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Andrew Bacevich on The New American Militarism

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  “As many frustrated Americans who have joined the Tea Party realize, we cannot stand against big government at home while supporting it abroad. We cannot talk about fiscal responsibility while spending trillions on occupying and bullying the rest of the world. We cannot talk about the budget deficit and spiraling domestic spending without looking at the costs of maintaining an American empire of more than 700 military bases in more than 120 foreign countries. We cannot pat ourselves on the back for cutting a few thousand dollars from a nature preserve or an inner-city swimming pool at home while turning a blind eye to a Pentagon budget that nearly equals those of the rest of the world combined.”

Ron Paul


Introduction

New American militarism is connected with the desire to establish global neoliberal empire ruled by the USA (the dream of total world dominance). It became official policy  since the collapse of the USSR  and involves "heliocentric" view on foreign policy, when the USA is the center of the world order and other states just rotate around it on various orbits. The US population is by-and-large-completely brainwashed into this vision.

Opposition to the US militarism is almost non-existent due contemporary US popular culture infused with the language of militarism and American exceptionalism. As Bacevich  noted:

In any Clancy novel, the international order is a dangerous and threatening place, awash with heavily armed and implacably determined enemies who threaten the United States. That Americans have managed to avoid Armageddon is attributable to a single fact: the men and women of America’s uniformed military and its intelligence services have thus far managed to avert those threats. The typical Clancy novel is an unabashed tribute to the skill, honor, extraordinary technological aptitude and sheer decency of the nation’s defenders. To read Red Storm Rising is to enter a world of ‘virtuous men and perfect weapons’, as one reviewer noted. ‘All the Americans are paragons of courage, endurance and devotion to service and country. Their officers are uniformly competent and occasionally inspired. Men of all ranks are faithful husbands and devoted fathers.’ Indeed, in the contract that he signed for the filming of Red October, Clancy stipulated that nothing in the film show the navy in a bad light.

The "New American militarism" or as it called "Neocon mentality" is not that different from the early Soviets militarism (of  Trotskyite variety), eager to spread the blessings of Scientific Socialism toward other countries on the tips of bayonets.  Here the role of scientific socialism is played by neoliberal ideology. With the slogan "Transnational elite unite" and Davos style Congresses of the new   "Neoliberal International" of comprador elites. While converting other countries into neoliberal model using color revolution of direct military invasion or combination of both) are disguised as spread of "democracy".

In this new Crusade for world hegemony the key ideas of Trotsky Permanent Revolution remains intact -- a crusade for establishing new social system on all counties on the Earth. This is just Great Neoliberal Crusade, instead of Communist Crusade.  This new justification for Crusades has the same problems as two previous. But it does not matter as the key role of democracy here is the same as in quote "the goal justifies the means" 

Professor Andrew Bacevich wrote several short books on the subject. he avoids the term neoliberalism and did not try to explain new American militarism in terms of the quest for neoliberal empire expansion. But he is a very good observer and the books contain many insights into US elite thinking and blunders. Among them we can note two:

While all three books are excellent and raise important issues,  they overlap. Probably the most original and the most important on them is Washington Rules, were Bacevich attempts to explain "Permanent War for Permanent Peace" that the USA practice since the end of WWII. All three books have the same weaknesses: Bacevich does not see connection between Neoliberalism demand for economic expansion and "New American Militarism" and regime of permanent wars that the USA pursue since WWII.

He provide sharp critique of neocons, but never ask the question: which political forces brought those pathetic second or third rate thinkers to the forefront of formulation of the US foreign policy and maintain them for more then a decade after Iraq debacle.

He also mistakenly believe that American people (who were completely estranged from any influence on nation's policies) bear some guilt for the policy which was formulated to benefit the first hundred of the largest US corporations. In other words he does not understand that the USA is yet another occupied country.

Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War; War as a natural state of the USA since 1945

[Neocons] advocate permanent war for permanent peace

Professor Basevich

The foreign policy of the USA since 1945, but especially, after the dissolution of the USSR was and is "open militarism". Recently  John Quiggin  tried to define militarism is came to the following definition (crookedtimber.org):

100 years after the Battle of the Somme, it's hard to see that much has been learned from the catastrophe of the Great War and the decades of slaughter that followed it. Rather than get bogged down (yet again) in specifics that invariably decline into arguments about who know more of the historical detail, I'm going to try a different approach, looking at the militarist ideology that gave us the War, and trying to articulate an anti-militarist alternative. Wikipedia offers a definition of militarism which, with the deletion of a single weasel word, seems to be entirely satisfactory and also seems to describe the dominant view of the political class, and much of the population in nearly every country in the world.

Militarism is the belief or desire of a government or people that a country should maintain a strong military capability and be prepared to use it aggressively[^1] to defend or promote national interests

This new epidemic of the US militarism started after the dissolution of the USSR was called by Professor Bacevich (who is former colonel of the US army)  it New American Militarism.

Bacevich's book  Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War  describe the "sacred trinity" of global US-led neoliberal empire:

Professor Bacevich had shown that the main driver of the US militarism is neocons domination of the US foreign policy, and, especially, neocons domination in State Department regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats are in power. They profess that the US that is uniquely qualified to take on the worldwide foes of peace and democracy, forgetting, revising, or ignoring the painful lessons of World War II, Vietnam, and Iraq. And that establishing and maintaining the neoliberal empire is worth the price we pay as it will take the USA into the period of unprecedented peace.

Bacevich scored a direct hit on the foundations of the American national security state with this scathing critique, and demolishes the unspoken assumptions that he believes have led the United States into a senseless, wasteful, and counter-productive "perpetual war for perpetual peace".

Bacevich scores a direct hit on the foundations of the American national security state with this scathing critique, and demolishes the unspoken assumptions that he believes have led the United States into a senseless, wasteful, and counter-productive posture of nearly perpetual war. These assumptions take the form of the "credo" -- which holds that the United States has the unique responsibility to intervene wherever it wants, for whatever purpose it wants, by whatever means it wants -- and the supporting "trinity" of requirements for the U.S. to maintain a global military presence, to configure its military forces for global power projection, and to counter threats by relying on a policy of global interventionism.

Lessons that President Obama is clearly never able to learn. In this sense his book Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War is an excellent peace of research with sections that some may find very troubling as it suggest that the USA elite is suicidal and is ready to sacrifice the county for achieving its delusional goal of world domination.

Here is the summary from Bacevich - Washington Rules (2010) - Synopsis by Mark K. Jensen

UFPPC (www.ufppc.org) Digging Deeper CXXXVII: September 27, 2010, 7:00 p.m. 

Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, August 2010).

Thesis

The Washington consensus on national security policy that constitutes convention wisdom in American foreign policy began with the Cold War and survived, remarkably, the Vietnam War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, no longer serves American interests, but the failure of the Obama administration to alter it shows that change can only come from the American people.

Introduction: Slow Learner

The author's faith in orthodoxy began to crumble when visiting the BrandenburgGate in Berlin in the winter of 1990-1991(1-4). In October 1990 a visit to Jenarevealed the backwardness of EastGermany (4-6). During his years in the Army, Bacevich had kept down doubts; after the end of the Cold War he retired, and his loss of status freed him to educate himself (6-10).

"George W.Bush's decision to launch Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 pushed me fully into opposition" (10). "This book aims to take stock of conventional wisdom" (11). The past 60 years of American history shows continuity: a symbiotic "credo" (formulated by Henry Luce in 1941 as the "American Century") and a "sacred trinity" ("the minimum essentials of international peace and order require the United States to maintain a global military presence, to configure its forces for global power projection, and to counter existing or anticipated threats by relying on a policy of  global interventionism") together define "the rules to which Washington adheres" (11-15).

In this book, "Washington" refers to the upper echelons of the three branches of government, the main agencies of the national security state, select think tanks and interest groups, "big banks and other financial institutions, defense contractors and major corporations, television networks and elite publications like the New York Times, even quasi-academic entities like the Council on Foreign Relations and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government" (15).

This book aspires to

(1) trace the history of the Washington rules;

(2) show who wins, who loses, and who pays under them;

(3) explain how itis perpetuated;

(4) show that the rules have lost what utility they might once have had;

and (5) re-legitimate "disreputable (or 'radical') views to our national security debates" (16).

The American Century is ending, and it "has become essential" to devise an "alternative to the reining national security paradigm" (16-18).

Ch. 1: The Advent of Semiwar.

As president, Barack Obama's efforts to change the U.S.'s exercise of power "have seldom risen above the cosmetic"(20). He made clear he subscribes to the "catechism of American statecraft," viz. that 1) the world must be organized, 2)only the U.S. can do it, 3) this includes dictating principles, and 4) not to accept this is to be a rogue or a recalcitrant (20-21).

It follows that the U.S. need not conform to the norms it sets for others and that it should maintain a worldwide network of bases (22-23).

Imagine if China acted in a comparable manner (23-25). The extraordinary American military posture in the world (25-27). To call this into question puts one beyond the pale(27). James Forrestal called this a permanent condition of semiwar, requiring high levels of military spending(27-28).

American citizens are not supposed to concern themselves with it (29-30). As to how this came about, the "standard story line" presents as the result of the decisions of a "succession of presidential administrations," though this conceals as much as it reveals (30-32).

Eisenhower's 1961 Farewell Address on the "military-industrial complex" was a rare exception (32-34). More important than presidents were Allen Dulles [1893-1969] and Curtis Lemay [1906-1990] (34-36).

Bacevich attributes the vision for an American-dominated post-World War II world with the CIA playing an active role to the patrician Dulles (36-43). The development of the U.S. military into a force capable of dominating the world, especially in the area of strategic weapons, he attributes to the hard-bitten Curtis LeMay, organizer of the StrategicAir Command (SAC) (43-52). Dulles and LeMay shared devotion to country, ruthlessness, a certain recklessness (52-55). They exploited American anxieties and insecurities in yin (Dulles's CIA) yang(LeMay's SAC) fashion, leaving the mainstay of American military power, the U.S. Army, in a relatively weak position(55-58).

Ch. 2: Illusions of Flexibility and Control

Kennedy kept Dulles and LeMay to signal continuity, but there was a behind-the-scenes struggle led by Gen. Maxwell Taylor to reassert the role of the U.S. Army by expanding and modernizing conventional forces that was "simultaneously masked by, and captured in, the phrase flexible response " (60; 59-63).

This agenda purported to aim at "resisting aggression" but really created new options for limited aggressive warfare by the U.S. (63-66).

McNamara engaged in a struggle with LeMay to control U.S. policy on nuclear weapons, but he embraced the need for redundancy based on a land-sea-air attack "triad" and LeMay et al. "got most of what they wanted" (66-72).

In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy instituted the morally and legally "indefensible" Operation Mongoose," in effect, a program of state-sponsored terrorism" against Cuba (80; 72-82 [but Bacevich is silent on its wilder elements, like Operation Northwoods]).

U.S. recklessness caused the Cuban Missile Crisis, and to his credit Kennedy acknowledged this (albeit privately) and "suspended the tradition" in defusing the crisis (82-87).

Bacevich rejects as a romantic delusion the view that in the aftermath of this crisis Kennedy turned against the military-industrial complex and the incipient Vietnam war and shows no interest in Kennedy's assassination itself (87-92).

He sees a parallel between escalation in Vietnam and post-9/11 aggression as "fought to sustain the Washington consensus" (107; 92-107).

Ch. 3: The Credo Restored.

William Fulbright's The Arrogance of Power (1966) urged a rethinking of the Washington rules (109-15). A radicalized David Shoup, a Medal of Honor winner and former commandant of the MarineCorps, argued in "The New American Militarism" (Atlantic, April 1969) that the U.S. had become "a militaristic and aggressive nation" (120; 115-21). The 1960s Zeitgeist shift made LeMay "an embarrassment, mocked and vilified rather than venerated," which showed that the Washington rules had incurred serious damage in Vietnam; the Army was in dire shape (122; 121-27).

Yet astonishingly, in the subsequent decade the "sacred trinity" (cf. 11-15) was "fully restored" (127). As in post-1918 Germany, élites looked for scapegoats and worked to reverse "the war's apparent verdict" (128). The Council on Foreign Relations 1976 volume entitled The Vietnam Legacy: The War, American Society, and the Future of American Foreign Policy is an expression of élite consensus that the Vietnam war was insignificant, an anomaly (129-34).

By 1980, Democrats and Republicans were again on the same page (134-36).Reagan's election "sealed the triumph of Vietnam revisionism" (136; 136-38). And the end of the Cold War posed no challenge to the Washington rules, as Madeleine Albright's pretentious arrogance exemplifies (138-45).

Ch. 4: Reconstituting the Trinity

The period from 1980 to 2000 saw "notretrenchment but reconfiguration" (147). The new mission was not American defense but facilitation of a new world order (148-50). After 9/11 this pretense was dropped and "[a]ctivism became the watchword" (150, emphasis in original;150-52). Resorting to war became "notably more frequent and less controversial" in 1980-2000, finding "its ultimate expression in the Bush Doctrine of preventive war" (152-53). Americans "passively assented" (154).

Behind the scenes, the shape this took was struggled over by the officer corps and civilian semi-warriors pushing RMA(Revolution in Military Affairs) (154-64).Initially, U.S. élites held that victory in Iraq demonstrated that speed could be substituted for mass in military campaigns (165-75). But the experience of the occupation revealed this to be a fantasy (175-81).

Ch. 5: Counterfeit COIN.

Counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine, replacing "shock and awe" as "the Long War" replaced the "global war on terror," is the latest doctrinal effort to preserve the Washington rules (182-86). The so-called "surge" implicitly marked a quest for conditions allowing the U.S. to leave Iraq without admitting defeat (186-91).Gen. David Petraeus emerged as an advocate (and as salesman, through FM3-24, the manual he revised and which Bacevich insists is in its emphasis on narrative replete with postmodernism) of counterinsurgency doctrine as "a substitute [for warfare] suited to the exercise of great power politics in the twilight of modernity" (197; 191-97). Implicitly, the manual argues that "war as such . . . no longer worked" (198; 198-202). Petraeus took credit for progress in Iraq that he did not achieve (202-04).

The general with a Princeton Ph.D. was lionized with a view to normalizing war and lowering expectations, a view now embraced by the Obama administration(205-11). Proponents of global counterinsurgency (GCOIN) emerged, like John Nagl and Gen. Benet Sacolick (211-13). Obama embraced the GCOIN version of the Long War with Gen.Stanley McChrystal to carry it out in Afghanistan, forfeiting the opportunity to reassess American policy (213-21).

Ch. 6: Cultivating Our Own Garden.

Time-honored no-nonsense American pragmatism has turned into an absurdity-swallowing herd mentality (222-23). The problem set the U.S. faces has radically changed from the time of the early Cold War, but the "sacred trinity" (cf. 11-15) that proposes to address them remains essentially the same (224-25).Eisenhower would have been appalled(225-26). The size of the Pentagon budget, the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and the extent of overseas military presence cannot be justified(226-27).

These persist because of the interests they serve, not the mission the fulfill, and are likely to do so for sometime (228-30). Bacevich invokes George Kennan, William Fulbright, and Martin Luther King Jr. in urging that the U.S. needs a new approach, to model freedom rather than impose it (231-37). First and foremost, America should save not the world but itself (237).

Bacevich proposes a new trinity:

  1. the purpose of the military is to defend the U.S. and its vital interests;
  2. soldiers' primary duty stations are on American soil;
  3. force should be used only as a last resort and in self-defense, in accord with the Just War tradition (238-41).

The American public must shoulder its complicity in what has happened, fostered by an all-volunteer force and debt-financed budgets (241-47). It is tragic that Barack Obama, elected to institute change, has lacked the courage to alter the Washington rules, instead "choosing to conform" (247-49). "If change is to come, it must come from the people"(249). The need for education "has become especially acute" (249; 249-50).

Except from Macmillan

Introduction: Slow Learner Worldly ambition inhibits true learning. Ask me. I know. A young man in a hurry is nearly uneducable: He knows what he wants and where he's headed; when it comes to looking back or entertaining heretical thoughts, he has neither the time nor the inclination. All that counts is that he is going somewhere. Only as ambition wanes does education become a possibility.

My own education did not commence until I had reached middle age. I can fix its start date with precision: For me, education began in Berlin, on a winter's evening, at the Brandenburg Gate, not long after the Berlin Wall had fallen. As an officer in the U.S. Army I had spent considerable time in Germany. Until that moment, however, my family and I had never had occasion to visit this most famous of German cities, still littered with artifacts of a deeply repellent history. At the end of a long day of exploration, we found ourselves in what had, until just months before, been the communist East. It was late and we were hungry, but I insisted on walking the length of the Unter den Linden, from the River Spree to the gate itself. A cold rain was falling and the pavement glistened. The buildings lining the avenue, dating from the era of Prussian kings, were dark, dirty, and pitted. Few people were about. It was hardly a night for sightseeing. For as long as I could remember, the Brandenburg Gate had been the preeminent symbol of the age and Berlin the epicenter of contemporary history. 

Yet by the time I made it to the once and future German capital, history was already moving on. The Cold War had abruptly ended. A divided city and a divided nation had re united. For Americans who had known Berlin only from a distance, the city existed primarily as a metaphor. Pick a date— 1933, 1942, 1945, 1948, 1961, 1989—and Berlin becomes an instructive symbol of power, depravity, tragedy, defiance, endurance, or vindication. For those inclined to view the past as a chronicle of parables, the modern history of Berlin offered an abundance of material. The greatest of those parables emerged from the events of 1933 to 1945, an epic tale of evil ascendant, belatedly confronted, then heroically overthrown.

A second narrative, woven from events during the intense period immediately following World War II, saw hopes for peace dashed, yielding bitter antagonism but also great resolve. The ensuing stand-off—the "long twilight struggle," in John Kennedy's memorable phrase— formed the centerpiece of the third parable, its central theme stubborn courage in the face of looming peril. Finally came the exhilarating events of 1989, with freedom ultimately prevailing, not only in Berlin, but throughout Eastern Europe.

.... ... ...

Although commonly depicted as the most advanced and successful component of the Soviet Empire, East Germany more closely resembled part of the undeveloped world.

... ... ...

Briquettes of soft coal used for home heating made the air all but unbreathable and coated everything with soot. In the German cities we knew, pastels predominated—houses and apartment blocks painted pale green, muted salmon, and soft yellow. Here everything was brown and gray

... ... ...

Bit by bit, my worldview started to crumble. That worldview had derived from this conviction: that American power manifested a commitment to global leadership, and that both together expressed and affirmed the nation's enduring devotion to its founding ideals. That American power, policies, and purpose were bound together in a neat, internally consistent package, each element drawing strength from and reinforcing the others, was something I took as a given. That, during my adult life, a penchant for interventionism had become a signature of U.S. policy did not—to me, at least—in any way contradict America's aspirations for peace. Instead, a willingness to expend lives and treasure in distant places testified to the seriousness of those aspirations. That, during this same period, the United States had amassed an arsenal of over thirty-one thousand nuclear weapons, some small number of them assigned to units in which I had served, was not at odds with our belief in the inalienable right to life and liberty; rather, threats to life and liberty had compelled the United States to acquire such an arsenal and maintain it in readiness for instant use.2 I was not so naíve as to believe that the American record had been without flaws. Yet I assured myself that any errors or misjudgments had been committed in good faith. Furthermore, circumstances permitted little real choice. In Southeast Asia as in Western Europe, in the Persian Gulf as in the Western Hemisphere, the United States had simply done what needed doing. Viable alternatives did not exist. To consent to any dilution of American power would be to forfeit global leadership, thereby putting at risk safety, prosperity, and freedom, not only our own but also that of our friends and allies.

The choices seemed clear enough. On one side was the status quo: the commitments, customs, and habits that defined American globalism, implemented by the national security apparatus within which I functioned as a small cog. On the other side was the prospect of appeasement, isolationism, and catastrophe. The only responsible course was the one to which every president since Harry Truman had adhered. For me, the Cold War had played a crucial role in sustaining that worldview.

Given my age, upbringing, and professional background, it could hardly have been otherwise. Although the great rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union had contained moments of considerable anxiety — I remember my father, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, stocking our basement with water and canned goods — it served primarily to clarify, not to frighten.

The Cold War provided a framework that organized and made sense of contemporary history. It offered a lineup and a scorecard. That there existed bad Germans and good Germans, their Germans and our Germans, totalitarian Germans and Germans who, like Americans, passionately loved freedom was, for example, a proposition I accepted as dogma. Seeing the Cold War as a struggle between good and evil answered many questions, consigned others to the periphery, and rendered still others irrelevant.

Back in the 1960s, during the Vietnam War, more than a few members of my generation had rejected the conception of the Cold War as a Manichean struggle. Here too, I was admittedly a slow learner. Yet having kept the faith long after others had lost theirs, the doubts that eventually assailed me were all the more disorienting. Granted, occasional suspicions had appeared long before Jena and Berlin

My own Vietnam experience had generated its share, which I had done my best to suppress. I was, after all, a serving soldier. Except in the narrowest of terms, the military profession, in those days at least, did not look kindly on nonconformity. Climbing the ladder of career success required curbing maverick tendencies. To get ahead, you needed to be a team player. Later, when studying the history of U.S. foreign relations in graduate school, I was pelted with challenges to orthodoxy, which I vigorously deflected. When it came to education, graduate school proved a complete waste of time — a period of intense study devoted to the further accumulation of facts, while I exerted myself to ensuring that they remained inert.

Now, however, my personal circumstances were changing. Shortly after the passing of the Cold War, my military career ended. Education thereby became not only a possibility, but also a necessity. In measured doses, mortification cleanses the soul. It's the perfect antidote for excessive self-regard. After twenty-three years spent inside the U.S. Army seemingly going somewhere, I now found myself on the outside going nowhere in particular. In the self-contained and cloistered universe of regimental life, I had briefly risen to the status of minor spear carrier. The instant I took off my uniform, that status vanished. I soon came to a proper appreciation of my own insignificance, a salutary lesson that I ought to have absorbed many years earlier. As I set out on what eventually became a crablike journey toward a new calling as a teacher and writer—a pilgrimage of sorts—ambition in the commonly accepted meaning of the term ebbed. This did not happen all at once. Yet gradually, trying to grab one of life's shiny brass rings ceased being a major preoccupation.

Wealth, power, and celebrity became not aspirations but subjects for critical analysis.

History—especially the familiar narrative of the Cold War—no longer offered answers; instead, it posed perplexing riddles. Easily the most nagging was this one: How could I have so profoundly misjudged the reality of what lay on the far side of the Iron Curtain? Had I been insufficiently attentive? Or was it possible that I had been snookered all along? Contemplating such questions, while simultaneously witnessing the unfolding of the "long 1990s"— the period bookended by two wars with Iraq when American vainglory reached impressive new heights—prompted the realization that I had grossly misinterpreted the threat posed by America's adversaries. Yet that was the lesser half of the problem. Far worse than misperceiving "them" was the fact that I had misperceived "us." What I thought I knew best I actually understood least. Here, the need for education appeared especially acute.

George W. Bush's decision to launch Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 pushed me fully into opposition. Claims that once seemed elementary—above all, claims relating to the essentially benign purposes of American power— now appeared preposterous. The contradictions that found an ostensibly peace-loving nation committing itself to a doctrine of preventive war became too great to ignore. The folly and hubris of the policy makers who heedlessly thrust the nation into an ill-defined and open-ended "global war on terror" without the foggiest notion of what victory would look like, how it would be won, and what it might cost approached standards hitherto achieved only by slightly mad German warlords. During the era of containment, the United States had at least maintained the pretense of a principled strategy; now, the last vestiges of principle gave way to fantasy and opportunism. With that, the worldview to which I had adhered as a young adult and carried into middle age dissolved completely. *

What should stand in the place of such discarded convictions? Simply inverting the conventional wisdom, substituting a new Manichean paradigm for the old discredited version—the United States taking the place of the Soviet Union as the source of the world's evil—would not suffice. Yet arriving at even an approximation of truth would entail subjecting conventional wisdom, both present and past, to sustained and searching scrutiny. Cautiously at first but with growing confidence, this I vowed to do. Doing so meant shedding habits of conformity acquired over decades. All of my adult life I had been a company man, only dimly aware of the extent to which institutional loyalties induce myopia. Asserting independence required first recognizing the extent to which I had been socialized to accept certain things as unimpeachable. Here then were the preliminary steps essential to making education accessible. Over a period of years, a considerable store of debris had piled up. Now, it all had to go. Belatedly, I learned that more often than not what passes for conventional wisdom is simply wrong. Adopting fashionable attitudes to demonstrate one's trustworthiness—the world of politics is flush with such people hoping thereby to qualify for inclusion in some inner circle—is akin to engaging in prostitution in exchange for promissory notes. It's not only demeaning but downright foolhardy. This book aims to take stock of conventional wisdom in its most influential and enduring form, namely the package of assumptions, habits, and precepts that have defined the tradition of statecraft to which the United States has adhered since the end of World War II— the era of global dominance now drawing to a close. This postwar tradition combines two components, each one so deeply embedded in the American collective consciousness as to have all but disappeared from view.

The first component specifies norms according to which the international order ought to work and charges the United States with responsibility for enforcing those norms. Call this the American credo. In the simplest terms, the credo summons the United States—and the United States alone—to lead, save, liberate, and ultimately transform the world. In a celebrated manifesto issued at the dawn of what he termed "The American Century," Henry R. Luce made the case for this spacious conception of global leadership. Writing in Life magazine in early 1941, the influential publisher exhorted his fellow citizens to "accept wholeheartedly our duty to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit." Luce thereby captured what remains even today the credo's essence.3 Luce's concept of an American Century, an age of unquestioned American global primacy, resonated, especially in Washington. His evocative phrase found a permanent place in the lexicon of national politics. (Recall that the neoconservatives who, in the 1990s, lobbied for more militant U.S. policies named their enterprise the Project for a New American Century.) So, too, did Luce's expansive claim of prerogatives to be exercised by the United States.

Even today, whenever public figures allude to America's responsibility to lead, they signal their fidelity to this creed. Along with respectful allusions to God and "the troops," adherence to Luce's credo has become a de facto prerequisite for high office. Question its claims and your prospects of being heard in the hubbub of national politics become nil. Note, however, that the duty Luce ascribed to Americans has two components. It is not only up to Americans, he wrote, to choose the purposes for which they would bring their influence to bear, but to choose the means as well. Here we confront the second component of the postwar tradition of American statecraft. With regard to means, that tradition has emphasized activism over example, hard power over soft, and coercion (often styled "negotiating from a position of strength") over suasion. Above all, the exercise of global leadership as prescribed by the credo obliges the United States to maintain military capabilities staggeringly in excess of those required for self-defense. Prior to World War II, Americans by and large viewed military power and institutions with skepticism, if not outright hostility. In the wake of World War II, that changed. An affinity for military might emerged as central to the American identity. By the midpoint of the twentieth century, "the Pentagon" had ceased to be merely a gigantic five-sided building.

Like "Wall Street" at the end of the nineteenth century, it had become Leviathan, its actions veiled in secrecy, its reach extending around the world. Yet while the concentration of power in Wall Street had once evoked deep fear and suspicion, Americans by and large saw the concentration of power in the Pentagon as benign. Most found it reassuring. A people who had long seen standing armies as a threat to liberty now came to believe that the preservation of liberty required them to lavish resources on the armed forces. During the Cold War, Americans worried ceaselessly about falling behind the Russians, even though the Pentagon consistently maintained a position of overall primacy. Once the Soviet threat disappeared, mere primacy no longer sufficed. With barely a whisper of national debate, unambiguous and perpetual global military supremacy emerged as an essential predicate to global leadership. Every great military power has its distinctive signature. For Napoleonic France, it was the levée en masse— the people in arms animated by the ideals of the Revolution. For Great Britain in the heyday of empire, it was command of the seas, sustained by a dominant fleet and a network of far-flung outposts from Gibraltar and the Cape of Good Hope to Singapore and Hong Kong. Germany from the 1860s to the 1940s (and Israel from 1948 to 1973) took another approach, relying on a potent blend of tactical flexibility and operational audacity to achieve battlefield superiority.

The abiding signature of American military power since World War II has been of a different order altogether. The United States has not specialized in any particular type of war. It has not adhered to a fixed tactical style. No single service or weapon has enjoyed consistent favor. At times, the armed forces have relied on citizen-soldiers to fill their ranks; at other times, long-service professionals. Yet an examination of the past sixty years of U.S. military policy and practice does reveal important elements of continuity. Call them the sacred trinity: an abiding conviction that the minimum essentials of international peace and order require the United States to maintain a global military presence, to configure its forces for global power projection, and to counter existing or anticipated threats by relying on a policy of global interventionism. Together, credo and trinity—the one defining purpose, the other practice—constitute the essence of the way that Washington has attempted to govern and police the American Century. The relationship between the two is symbiotic. The trinity lends plausibility to the credo's vast claims. For its part, the credo justifies the trinity's vast requirements and exertions.

Together they provide the basis for an enduring consensus that imparts a consistency to U.S. policy regardless of which political party may hold the upper hand or who may be occupying the White House. From the era of Harry Truman to the age of Barack Obama, that consensus has remained intact. It defines the rules to which Washington adheres; it determines the precepts by which Washington rules. As used here, Washington is less a geographic expression than a set of interlocking institutions headed by people who, whether acting officially or unofficially, are able to put a thumb on the helm of state. Washington, in this sense, includes the upper echelons of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the federal government. It encompasses the principal components of the national security state— the departments of Defense, State, and, more recently, Homeland Security, along with various agencies comprising the intelligence and federal law enforcement communities. Its ranks extend to select think tanks and interest groups. Lawyers, lobbyists, fixers, former officials, and retired military officers who still enjoy access are members in good standing. Yet Washington also reaches beyond the Beltway to include big banks and other financial institutions, defense contractors and major corporations, television networks and elite publications like the New York Times, even quasi-academic entities like the Council on Foreign Relations and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

With rare exceptions, acceptance of the Washington rules forms a prerequisite for entry into this world. My purpose in writing this book is fivefold: first, to trace the origins and evolution of the Washington rules—both the credo that inspires consensus and the trinity in which it finds expression; second, to subject the resulting consensus to critical inspection, showing who wins and who loses and also who foots the bill; third, to explain how the Washington rules are perpetuated, with certain views privileged while others are declared disreputable; fourth, to demonstrate that the rules themselves have lost whatever utility they may once have possessed, with their implications increasingly pernicious and their costs increasingly unaffordable; and finally, to argue for readmitting disreputable (or "radical") views to our national security debate, in effect legitimating alternatives to the status quo. In effect, my aim is to invite readers to share in the process of education on which I embarked two decades ago in Berlin. The Washington rules were forged at a moment when American influence and power were approaching their acme. That moment has now passed. The United States has drawn down the stores of authority and goodwill it had acquired by 1945. Words uttered in Washington command less respect than once was the case. Americans can ill afford to indulge any longer in dreams of saving the world, much less remaking it in our own image. The curtain is now falling on the American Century. Similarly, the United States no longer possesses sufficient wherewithal to sustain a national security strategy that relies on global military presence and global power projection to underwrite a policy of global interventionism. Touted as essential to peace, adherence to that strategy has propelled the United States into a condition approximating perpetual war, as the military misadventures of the past decade have demonstrated.

To anyone with eyes to see, the shortcomings inherent in the Washington rules have become plainly evident. Although those most deeply invested in perpetuating its conventions will insist otherwise, the tradition to which Washington remains devoted has begun to unravel. Attempting to prolong its existence might serve Washington's interests, but it will not serve the interests of the American people.

Devising an alternative to the reigning national security paradigm will pose a daunting challenge—especially if Americans look to "Washington" for fresh thinking. Yet doing so has become essential. In one sense, the national security policies to which Washington so insistently adheres express what has long been the preferred American approach to engaging the world beyond our borders. That approach plays to America's presumed strong suit—since World War II, and especially since the end of the Cold War, thought to be military power. In another sense, this reliance on military might creates excuses for the United States to avoid serious engagement: Confidence in American arms has made it unnecessary to attend to what others might think or to consider how their aspirations might differ from our own.

In this way, the Washington rules reinforce American provincialism—a national trait for which the United States continues to pay dearly. The persistence of these rules has also provided an excuse to avoid serious self-engagement. From this perspective, confidence that the credo and the trinity will oblige others to accommodate themselves to America's needs or desires — whether for cheap oil, cheap credit, or cheap consumer goods—has allowed Washington to postpone or ignore problems demanding attention here at home.

Fixing Iraq or Afghanistan ends up taking precedence over fixing Cleveland and Detroit. Purporting to support the troops in their crusade to free the world obviates any obligation to assess the implications of how Americans themselves choose to exercise freedom. When Americans demonstrate a willingness to engage seriously with others, combined with the courage to engage seriously with themselves, then real education just might begin.

In their article ‘The American Century’ Has Plunged the World Into Crisis. What Happens Now?" Conn Hallinan and Leon Wofsy outlined important reasons  of the inevitability of the dominance of chicken hawks and jingoistic foreign policy in the USA political establishment:

June 22, 2015 | fpif.org

U.S. foreign policy is dangerous, undemocratic, and deeply out of sync with real global challenges. Is continuous war inevitable, or can we change course?

There’s something fundamentally wrong with U.S. foreign policy.

Despite glimmers of hope — a tentative nuclear agreement with Iran, for one, and a long-overdue thaw with Cuba — we’re locked into seemingly irresolvable conflicts in most regions of the world. They range from tensions with nuclear-armed powers like Russia and China to actual combat operations in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa.

Why? Has a state of perpetual warfare and conflict become inescapable? Or are we in a self-replicating cycle that reflects an inability — or unwillingness — to see the world as it actually is?

The United States is undergoing a historic transition in our relationship to the rest of the world, but this is neither acknowledged nor reflected in U.S. foreign policy. We still act as if our enormous military power, imperial alliances, and self-perceived moral superiority empower us to set the terms of “world order.”

While this illusion goes back to the end of World War II, it was the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union that signaled the beginning of a self-proclaimed “American Century.” The idea that the United States had “won” the Cold War and now — as the world’s lone superpower — had the right or responsibility to order the world’s affairs led to a series of military adventures. It started with President Bill Clinton’s intervention in the Yugoslav civil war, continued on with George W. Bush’s disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and can still be seen in the Obama administration’s own misadventures in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and beyond.

In each case, Washington chose war as the answer to enormously complex issues, ignoring the profound consequences for both foreign and domestic policy. Yet the world is very different from the assumptions that drive this impulsive interventionism.

It’s this disconnect that defines the current crisis.

Acknowledging New Realities

So what is it about the world that requires a change in our outlook? A few observations come to mind.

First, our preoccupation with conflicts in the Middle East — and to a significant extent, our tensions with Russia in Eastern Europe and with China in East Asia — distract us from the most compelling crises that threaten the future of humanity. Climate change and environmental perils have to be dealt with now and demand an unprecedented level of international collective action. That also holds for the resurgent danger of nuclear war.

Second, superpower military interventionism and far-flung acts of war have only intensified conflict, terror, and human suffering. There’s no short-term solution — especially by force — to the deep-seated problems that cause chaos, violence, and misery through much of the world.

Third, while any hope of curbing violence and mitigating the most urgent problems depends on international cooperation, old and disastrous intrigues over spheres of influence dominate the behavior of the major powers. Our own relentless pursuit of military advantage on every continent, including through alliances and proxies like NATO, divides the world into “friend” and “foe” according to our perceived interests. That inevitably inflames aggressive imperial rivalries and overrides common interests in the 21st century.

Fourth, while the United States remains a great economic power, economic and political influence is shifting and giving rise to national and regional centers no longer controlled by U.S.-dominated global financial structures. Away from Washington, London, and Berlin, alternative centers of economic power are taking hold in Beijing, New Delhi, Cape Town, and Brasilia. Independent formations and alliances are springing up: organizations like the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa); the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (representing 2.8 billion people); the Union of South American Nations; the Latin American trade bloc, Mercosur; and others.

Beyond the problems our delusions of grandeur have caused in the wider world, there are enormous domestic consequences of prolonged war and interventionism. We shell out over $1 trillion a year in military-related expenses even as our social safety net frays and our infrastructure crumbles. Democracy itself has become virtually dysfunctional.

Short Memories and Persistent Delusions

But instead of letting these changing circumstances and our repeated military failures give us pause, our government continues to act as if the United States has the power to dominate and dictate to the rest of the world.

The responsibility of those who set us on this course fades into background. Indeed, in light of the ongoing meltdown in the Middle East, leading presidential candidates are tapping neoconservatives like John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz — who still think the answer to any foreign policy quandary is military power — for advice. Our leaders seem to forget that following this lot’s advice was exactly what caused the meltdown in the first place. War still excites them, risks and consequences be damned.

While the Obama administration has sought, with limited success, to end the major wars it inherited, our government makes wide use of killer drones in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, and has put troops back into Iraq to confront the religious fanaticism and brutality of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) — itself a direct consequence of the last U.S. invasion of Iraq. Reluctant to find common ground in the fight against ISIS with designated “foes” like Iran and Syria, Washington clings to allies like Saudi Arabia, whose leaders are fueling the crisis of religious fanaticism and internecine barbarity. Elsewhere, the U.S. also continues to give massive support to the Israeli government, despite its expanding occupation of the West Bank and its horrific recurring assaults on Gaza.

A “war first” policy in places like Iran and Syria is being strongly pushed by neoconservatives like former Vice President Dick Cheney and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain. Though it’s attempted to distance itself from the neocons, the Obama administration adds to tensions with planned military realignments like the “Asia pivot” aimed at building up U.S. military forces in Asia to confront China. It’s also taken a more aggressive position than even other NATO partners in fostering a new cold war with Russia.

We seem to have missed the point: There is no such thing as an “American Century.” International order cannot be enforced by a superpower alone. But never mind centuries — if we don’t learn to take our common interests more seriously than those that divide nations and breed the chronic danger of war, there may well be no tomorrows.

Unexceptionalism

There’s a powerful ideological delusion that any movement seeking to change U.S. foreign policy must confront: that U.S. culture is superior to anything else on the planet. Generally going by the name of “American exceptionalism,” it’s the deeply held belief that American politics (and medicine, technology, education, and so on) are better than those in other countries. Implicit in the belief is an evangelical urge to impose American ways of doing things on the rest of the world.

Americans, for instance, believe they have the best education system in the world, when in fact they’ve dropped from 1st place to 14th place in the number of college graduates. We’ve made students of higher education the most indebted section of our population, while falling to 17th place in international education ratings. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation, the average American pays more than twice as much for his or her education than those in the rest of the world.

Health care is an equally compelling example. In the World Health Organization’s ranking of health care systems in 2000, the United States was ranked 37th. In a more recent Institute of Medicine report in 2013, the U.S. was ranked the lowest among 17 developed nations studied.

The old anti-war slogan, “It will be a good day when schools get all the money they need and the Navy has to hold a bake sale to buy an aircraft carrier” is as appropriate today as it was in the 1960s. We prioritize corporate subsidies, tax cuts for the wealthy, and massive military budgets over education. The result is that Americans are no longer among the most educated in the world.

But challenging the “exceptionalism” myth courts the danger of being labeled “unpatriotic” and “un-American,” two powerful ideological sanctions that can effectively silence critical or questioning voices.

The fact that Americans consider their culture or ideology “superior” is hardly unique. But no other country in the world has the same level of economic and military power to enforce its worldview on others.

The United States did not simply support Kosovo’s independence, for example. It bombed Serbia into de facto acceptance. When the U.S. decided to remove the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Gaddafi from power, it just did so. No other country is capable of projecting that kind of force in regions thousands of miles from its borders.

The U.S. currently accounts for anywhere from 45 to 50 percent of the world’s military spending. It has hundreds of overseas bases, ranging from huge sprawling affairs like Camp Bond Steel in Kosovo and unsinkable aircraft carriers around the islands of Okinawa, Wake, Diego Garcia, and Guam to tiny bases called “lily pads” of pre-positioned military supplies. The late political scientist Chalmers Johnson estimated that the U.S. has some 800 bases worldwide, about the same as the British Empire had at its height in 1895.

The United States has long relied on a military arrow in its diplomatic quiver, and Americans have been at war almost continuously since the end of World War II. Some of these wars were major undertakings: Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq (twice), Libya. Some were quick “smash and grabs” like Panama and Grenada. Others are “shadow wars” waged by Special Forces, armed drones, and local proxies. If one defines the term “war” as the application of organized violence, the U.S. has engaged in close to 80 wars since 1945.

The Home Front

The coin of empire comes dear, as the old expression goes.

According Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, the final butcher bill for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars — including the long-term health problems of veterans — will cost U.S. taxpayers around $6 trillion. One can add to that the over $1 trillion the U.S. spends each year on defense-related items. The “official” defense budget of some half a trillion dollars doesn’t include such items as nuclear weapons, veterans’ benefits or retirement, the CIA and Homeland Security, nor the billions a year in interest we’ll be paying on the debt from the Afghan-Iraq wars. By 2013 the U.S. had already paid out $316 billion in interest.

The domestic collateral damage from that set of priorities is numbing.

We spend more on our “official” military budget than we do on Medicare, Medicaid, Health and Human Services, Education, and Housing and Urban Development combined. Since 9/11, we’ve spent $70 million an hour on “security” compared to $62 million an hour on all domestic programs.

As military expenditures dwarf funding for deteriorating social programs, they drive economic inequality. The poor and working millions are left further and further behind. Meanwhile the chronic problems highlighted at Ferguson, and reflected nationwide, are a horrific reminder of how deeply racism — the unequal economic and social divide and systemic abuse of black and Latino youth — continues to plague our homeland.

The state of ceaseless war has deeply damaged our democracy, bringing our surveillance and security state to levels that many dictators would envy. The Senate torture report, most of it still classified, shatters the trust we are asked to place in the secret, unaccountable apparatus that runs the most extensive Big Brother spy system ever devised.

Bombs and Business

President Calvin Coolidge was said to have remarked that “the business of America is business.” Unsurprisingly, U.S. corporate interests play a major role in American foreign policy.

Out of the top 10 international arms producers, eight are American. The arms industry spends millions lobbying Congress and state legislatures, and it defends its turf with an efficiency and vigor that its products don’t always emulate on the battlefield. The F-35 fighter-bomber, for example — the most expensive weapons system in U.S. history — will cost $1.5 trillion and doesn’t work. It’s over budget, dangerous to fly, and riddled with defects. And yet few lawmakers dare challenge the powerful corporations who have shoved this lemon down our throats.

Corporate interests are woven into the fabric of long-term U.S. strategic interests and goals. Both combine to try to control energy supplies, command strategic choke points through which oil and gas supplies transit, and ensure access to markets.

Many of these goals can be achieved with standard diplomacy or economic pressure, but the U.S. always reserves the right to use military force. The 1979 “Carter Doctrine” — a document that mirrors the 1823 Monroe Doctrine about American interests in Latin America — put that strategy in blunt terms vis-à-vis the Middle East:

 “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

It’s no less true in East Asia. The U.S. will certainly engage in peaceful economic competition with China. But if push comes to shove, the Third, Fifth, and Seventh fleets will back up the interests of Washington and its allies — Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Australia.

Trying to change the course of American foreign policy is not only essential for reducing international tensions. It’s critically important to shift the enormous wealth we expend in war and weapons toward alleviating growing inequality and social crises at home.

As long as competition for markets and accumulation of capital characterize modern society, nations will vie for spheres of influence, and antagonistic interests will be a fundamental feature of international relations. Chauvinist reaction to incursions real or imagined — and the impulse to respond by military means — is characteristic to some degree of every significant nation-state. Yet the more that some governments, including our own, become subordinate to oligarchic control, the greater is the peril.

Finding the Common Interest

These, however, are not the only factors that will shape the future.

There is nothing inevitable that rules out a significant change of direction, even if the demise or transformation of a capitalistic system of greed and exploitation is not at hand. The potential for change, especially in U.S. foreign policy, resides in how social movements here and abroad respond to the undeniable reality of: 1) the chronic failure, massive costs, and danger inherent in “American Century” exceptionalism; and 2) the urgency of international efforts to respond to climate change.

There is, as well, the necessity to respond to health and natural disasters aggravated by poverty, to rising messianic violence, and above all, to prevent a descent into war. This includes not only the danger of a clash between the major nuclear powers, but between regional powers. A nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India, for example, would affect the whole world.

Without underestimating the self-interest of forces that thrive on gambling with the future of humanity, historic experience and current reality elevate a powerful common interest in peace and survival. The need to change course is not something that can be recognized on only one side of an ideological divide. Nor does that recognition depend on national, ethnic, or religious identity. Rather, it demands acknowledging the enormous cost of plunging ahead as everything falls apart around us.

After the latest U.S. midterm elections, the political outlook is certainly bleak. But experience shows that elections, important as they are, are not necessarily indicators of when and how significant change can come about in matters of policy. On issues of civil rights and social equality, advances have occurred because a dedicated and persistent minority movement helped change public opinion in a way the political establishment could not defy.

The Vietnam War, for example, came to an end, despite the stubbornness of Democratic and Republican administrations, when a stalemate on the battlefield and growing international and domestic opposition could no longer be denied. Significant changes can come about even as the basic character of society is retained. Massive resistance and rejection of colonialism caused the British Empire and other colonial powers to adjust to a new reality after World War II. McCarthyism was eventually defeated in the United States. President Nixon was forced to resign. The use of landmines and cluster bombs has been greatly restricted because of the opposition of a small band of activists whose initial efforts were labeled “quixotic.”

There are diverse and growing political currents in our country that see the folly and danger of the course we’re on. Many Republicans, Democrats, independents, and libertarians — and much of the public — are beginning to say “enough” to war and military intervention all over the globe, and the folly of basing foreign policy on dividing countries into “friend or foe.”

This is not to be Pollyannaish about anti-war sentiment, or how quickly people can be stampeded into supporting the use of force. In early 2014, some 57 percent of Americans agreed that “over-reliance on military force creates more hatred leading to increased terrorism.” Only 37 percent believed military force was the way to go. But once the hysteria around the Islamic State began, those numbers shifted to pretty much an even split: 47 percent supported the use of military force, 46 percent opposed it.

It will always be necessary in each new crisis to counter those who mislead and browbeat the public into acceptance of another military intervention. But in spite of the current hysterics about ISIS, disillusionment in war as an answer is probably greater now among Americans and worldwide than it has ever been. That sentiment may prove strong enough to produce a shift away from perpetual war, a shift toward some modesty and common-sense realism in U.S. foreign policy.

Making Space for the Unexpected

Given that there is a need for a new approach, how can American foreign policy be changed?

Foremost, there is the need for a real debate on the thrust of a U.S. foreign policy that chooses negotiation, diplomacy, and international cooperation over the use of force.

However, as we approach another presidential election, there is as yet no strong voice among the candidates to challenge U.S. foreign policy. Fear and questionable political calculation keep even most progressive politicians from daring to dissent as the crisis of foreign policy lurches further into perpetual militarism and war. That silence of political acquiescence has to be broken.

Nor is it a matter of concern only on the left. There are many Americans — right, left, or neither — who sense the futility of the course we’re on. These voices have to be represented or the election process will be even more of a sham than we’ve recently experienced.

One can’t predict just what initiatives may take hold, but the recent U.S.-China climate agreement suggests that necessity can override significant obstacles. That accord is an important step forward, although a limited bilateral pact cannot substitute for an essential international climate treaty. There is a glimmer of hope also in the U.S.-Russian joint action that removed chemical weapons from Syria, and in negotiations with Iran, which continue despite fierce opposition from U.S. hawks and the Israeli government. More recently, there is Obama’s bold move — long overdue — to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba. Despite shifts in political fortunes, the unexpected can happen if there is a need and strong enough pressure to create an opportunity.

We do not claim to have ready-made solutions to the worsening crisis in international relations. We are certain that there is much we’ve missed or underestimated. But if readers agree that U.S. foreign policy has a national and global impact, and that it is not carried out in the interests of the majority of the world’s people, including our own, then we ask you to join this conversation.

If we are to expand the ability of the people to influence foreign policy, we need to defend democracy, and encourage dissent and alternative ideas. The threats to the world and to ourselves are so great that finding common ground trumps any particular interest. We also know that we won’t all agree with each other, and we believe that is as it should be. There are multiple paths to the future. No coalition around changing foreign policy will be successful if it tells people to conform to any one pattern of political action.

So how does the call for changing course translate to something politically viable, and how do we consider the problem of power?

The power to make significant changes in policy ranges from the persistence of peace activists to the potential influence of the general public. In some circumstances, it becomes possible — as well as necessary — to make significant changes in the power structure itself.

Greece comes to mind. Greek left organizations came together to form Syriza, the political party that was successfully elected to power on a platform of ending austerity. Spain’s anti-austerity Podemos Party — now the number-two party in the country — came out of massive demonstrations in 2011 and was organized from the grassroots up. We do not argue one approach over the over, but the experiences in both countries demonstrate that there are multiple paths to generating change.

Certainly progressives and leftists grapple with the problems of power. But progress on issues, particularly in matters like war and peace and climate change, shouldn’t be conceived of as dependent on first achieving general solutions to the problems of society, however desirable.

... ... ...

Conn Hallinan is a journalist and a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus. His writings appear online at Dispatches From the Edge. Leon Wofsy is a retired biology professor and long-time political activist. His comments on current affairs appear online at Leon’s OpEd.

Another useful review is from  Gerard De Groot -- Andrew Bacevich's Washington Rules and John Dower's Cultures of War  Here are some highlights:

"...These rules have pushed the United States to a state of perpetual war. With enemies supposedly everywhere, the pursuit of security has become open-ended. "
"...One is reminded of John Winthrop, who, in 1630, told the future residents of Massachusetts Bay Colony: "We shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us." Over subsequent decades, Winthrop's sermon became the American mission, fired by self-righteousness and fueled by self-confidence. From that mission emerged the idea of Manifest Destiny -- American ideals should spread across the continent and around the globe. Along the way, Americans lost sight of what Winthrop actually meant. His words were both inspiration and warning: Aspire to greatness, but remain honorable. Power lies in virtue. Winthrop envisaged a shining beacon, worthy of emulation. He saw no need to come down from the hill and ram ideals down the throats of the recalcitrant. "
"...Back in 1963, the Kennedy administration was faced with a steadily disintegrating situation in Vietnam. At a turbulent cabinet meeting, Attorney General Robert Kennedy asked: If the situation is so dire, why not withdraw? Arthur Schlesinger, present at the meeting, noted how "the question hovered for a moment, then died away." It was "a hopelessly alien thought in a field of unexplored assumptions and entrenched convictions." The Washington rules kept the United States on a steady course toward disaster. "
"...Barack Obama once promised that change was coming, but then quickly adhered to the old rules by escalating an unwinnable and certainly unaffordable war in Afghanistan. Failures, as Steffens hoped, have been illuminating, but after each flash of light, darkness has prevailed. "
September 12, 2010 | washingtonpost.com

WASHINGTON RULES: America's Path to Permanent War

This Story

By Andrew J. Bacevich

Metropolitan. 286 pp. $25

CULTURES OF WAR

Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq

By John W. Dower

Norton. 596 pp. $29.95

"We need some great failures," the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens wrote in his autobiography. "Especially we ever-successful Americans -- conscious, intelligent, illuminating failures." What Steffens meant was that a people confident in righteousness need occasionally to be reminded of their fallibility. The past 50 years have produced failures aplenty -- the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam and Iraq among them. Unfortunately, as Andrew Bacevich and John Dower demonstrate, the light of failure has not penetrated the darkness of delusion. As a result, wars provide a repeating rhythm of folly.

"Washington Rules" and "Cultures of War" are two excellent books made better by the coincidence of their publication. In complementary fashion, they provide a convincing critique of America's conduct of war since 1941. Steffens would have liked these books, specifically for the way they use past failures to explain the provenance of our current predicament.

Read "Cultures of War" first. It's not an easy book, but it is consistently perceptive. Dower examines Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, Sept. 11 and the second Iraq War, drawing disconcerting linkages. Pearl Harbor and Iraq, he feels, demonstrate how otherwise intelligent leaders are drawn toward strategic imbecility. Both attacks were brilliantly executed in the short term, but neither paid sufficient attention to the long-term problem of winning a war. More controversially, Dower pairs Hiroshima with Sept. 11, both acts of terror born of moral certitude. Osama bin Laden and Harry Truman justified wanton killing with essentially the same Manichean rhetoric. Motives, context and scale might have been different; methods were not. For both leaders, the ability to separate good from evil made killing easy.

In 1941, Americans drew comfort from the stereotype of the irrational Oriental. They assumed that the Japanese would be easily defeated because they were illogical -- as their attack upon Pearl Harbor proved. That attack was indeed illogical (given the impossibility of defeating the United States in a protracted war), but it was not peculiarly Japanese. As Dower reveals, the wishful thinking, delusion and herd behavior within the court of Emperor Hirohito was a symptom of war, not ethnicity. The same deficiencies, in 2003, convinced those in the Oval Office that invading Iraq was a good idea.

Since the culture of war encourages patterned behavior, folly proliferates. This is the essence of the Washington rules that Bacevich elucidates. The rules dictate that protection of the American way of life necessitates a global military presence and a willingness to intervene anywhere. Power and violence are cleansed by virtue: Because America is "good," her actions are always benign. These rules have pushed the United States to a state of perpetual war. With enemies supposedly everywhere, the pursuit of security has become open-ended.

The alternative, according to Bacevich, is not isolationism or appeasement, two politically loaded words frequently used to pummel those who object to Washington's behavior. He advocates, instead, a more level-headed assessment of danger, advice all the more cogent since it comes from a former soldier. Iraq and Afghanistan did not threaten America; in fact, those countries and the world have become more dangerous because of heavy-handed American intervention. Nor does North Korea pose a threat. Nor did Vietnam.

One is reminded of John Winthrop, who, in 1630, told the future residents of Massachusetts Bay Colony: "We shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us." Over subsequent decades, Winthrop's sermon became the American mission, fired by self-righteousness and fueled by self-confidence. From that mission emerged the idea of Manifest Destiny -- American ideals should spread across the continent and around the globe. Along the way, Americans lost sight of what Winthrop actually meant. His words were both inspiration and warning: Aspire to greatness, but remain honorable. Power lies in virtue. Winthrop envisaged a shining beacon, worthy of emulation. He saw no need to come down from the hill and ram ideals down the throats of the recalcitrant.

The power of virtue is Bacevich's most profound message. Instead of trying to fix Afghanistan's Helmand Province, he insists, Americans should fix Detroit and Cleveland. Instead of attempting to export notions of freedom and democracy to nations that lack experience of either, America should demonstrate, by her actions, that she is still a free, democratic and humane nation. Her real strength lies in her liberal tradition, not in her ability to kill.

Back in 1963, the Kennedy administration was faced with a steadily disintegrating situation in Vietnam. At a turbulent cabinet meeting, Attorney General Robert Kennedy asked: If the situation is so dire, why not withdraw? Arthur Schlesinger, present at the meeting, noted how "the question hovered for a moment, then died away." It was "a hopelessly alien thought in a field of unexplored assumptions and entrenched convictions." The Washington rules kept the United States on a steady course toward disaster.

Those unexplored assumptions and entrenched convictions have now pushed the United States into a new quagmire. Despite that predicament, both Dower and Bacevich try to end positively. "If change is to come, it must come from the people," argues Bacevich. Dower agrees. But these feeble attempts at optimism are the least convincing parts of two otherwise brilliant books. Barack Obama once promised that change was coming, but then quickly adhered to the old rules by escalating an unwinnable and certainly unaffordable war in Afghanistan. Failures, as Steffens hoped, have been illuminating, but after each flash of light, darkness has prevailed.

Gerard De Groot is a professor of history at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and author of "The Bomb: A Life."

 Andrew Feldman review (Review Washington Rules - FPIF)

Army-officer-turned professor Andrew Bacevich makes the realist case against American expansionism.

By Andrew Feldman, August 26, 2010.

Print

For his first 40 years, Andrew Bacevich lived the conventional life of an army officer. In the military world where success depended on conformity, he followed the rules and “took comfort in orthodoxy…[finding] assurance in conventional wisdom.” Comfort, that is, until he had a chance to peer behind the Iron Curtain, and was shocked to find East Germany more third-world shambles than first-rate threat.

That experience, combined with the introspection that followed his subsequent retirement from the army, led Bacevich to reevaluate the relationship between truth and power. After having taken his superiors at their word for decades, he slowly came to understand “that authentic truth is never simple and that any version of truth handed down from on high…is inherently suspect. The exercise of power necessarily involves manipulation and is antithetical to candor.”

Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War is Bacevich’s fourth book on the subject of American exercise of power. This time, he takes up the question of the political calculations that have produced the basic tenets of American foreign policy since the beginning of the Cold War, examining how and why they came to exist and to survive all challenges to their supremacy.

Bacevich describes two components that define U.S. foreign policy.

These rules, Bacevich argues, are no longer vital to the existence of the United States, and have led to actions that threaten to break the army and bankrupt the treasury. Rather, they are kept in place by individuals who derive personal benefit from their continuance. Bacevich does not hesitate to blame a Washington class that “clings to its credo and trinity not out of necessity, but out of parochial self-interest laced with inertia.”

This is a theme that runs throughout the book: that those who make the rules also benefit from them, and thus their demands should always be regarded skeptically.

While abstaining from questioning the patriotism of past leaders, Bacevich is not reluctant to point out how many policies that were later widely embraced were originally trumpeted by ambitious men who had as much to gain personally by their acceptance as did the country:

The story of foreign policy, then, is not so much different than any government bureaucracy through which vast sums of money flow, and is driven as much by officials jockeying for status than by genuine concern for policy outcomes. Whether in disputes between the Army and the Air Force or the Pentagon and the White House, and whether over money or over purpose, different sectors of the national security establishment propose and promote new doctrines that necessitate increasing their budgets and enhancing their importance.

But Bacevich is not content to only blame leaders. In contrast to George Washington’s ideal of the citizen who would consider it his duty to actively serve his country, Bacevich finds today’s Americans “greedy and gullible,” pursuing personal gain in the stead of collective benefit. Any solution, he argues, must come from an awakened people who demand change from the people they put in office.

As for what that change should look like, Bacevich proposes a new credo and trinity. As a new mission statement, he offers: “America’s purpose is to be America, striving to fulfill the aspirations expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as reinterpreted with the passage of time and in light of hard-earned experience.”

As a new trinity, he suggests that “the purpose of the U.S, military is not to combat evil or remake the world but to defend the United States and its most vital interests…the primary duty station of the American soldier is in America…consistent with the Just War tradition, the United States should employ force only as a last resort and only in self defense.”

Bacevich writes in the short, clipped style with which he also speaks, presumably a legacy of his West Point education and decades in the military. His style allows for easy comprehension and neat packaging of his ideas, and readers will not get bogged down in flowery language.

Parts of Bacevich’s thinking require further scrutiny and remind readers of his self-identification as a conservative (lowercase “c”). Economically, he is no fan of stimulus spending, and socially he places blame on individual failings and personal flaws, choosing not to mention an unequal economic system that leaves tens of millions of Americans with barely the resources to take care of their families, much less have time to be informed and active citizens.

In fact, the emphasis throughout the book is on the fact that expansionism, at this particular moment, is not wrong but impossible. Bacevich is, after all, a realist when it comes to international relations theory, and though he happens to agree with liberal anti-imperials on many issues, it is often for different reasons.

However, debates over theory can wait for when the republic is in less immediate peril. This is the second work Bacevich has published under the auspices of the American Empire Project, a book series documenting America’s imperial adventures and their disastrous consequences. The contribution of conservative authors to this task is vital. They remind us that opposition to imperialism is hardly just a liberal cause, and in fact for much of American history was actually a rallying point for conservatives across the country.

Washington Rules is valuable for putting in print what those inside the military establishment don’t dare admit: that, even aside from moral concerns, U.S. international strategy is neither successful nor sustainable and maintained more by lies than by actual results. Bacevich can truly be said to be a realist in that he understand that leaders, when faced with the choice of admitting failure or lying, will almost always choose the latter.

Andrew Feldman is an intern with Foreign Policy In Focus.

 

The Limits of Power The End of American Exceptionalism

Here is one Amazon reader review of he first book (Amazon.com David R. Cook Dave Cook's review of The Limits of Power The End of American E...)

Cliche or not, this is a "Must Read" book

By David R. Cook on August 15, 2008

Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

This is the bluntest, toughest, most scathing critique of American imperialism as it has become totally unmoored after the demise of the Soviet Communist empire and taken to a new level by the Bush administration. Even the brevity of this book - 182 pages - gives it a particular wallop since every page "concentrates the mind".

In the event a reader knows of the prophetic work of the American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, you will further appreciate this book. Bacevich is a Niebuhr scholar and this book essentially channels Niebuhr's prophetic warnings from his 1952 book, "The Irony of American History". The latter has just been reissued by University of Chicago Press thanks to Andrew Bacevich who also contributed an introduction.

In essence, American idealism as particularly reflected in Bush's illusory goal to "rid the world of evil" and to bring freedom and democracy to the Middle East or wherever people are being tyrannized, is doomed to failure by the tides of history. Niebuhr warned against this and Bacevich updates the history from the Cold War to the present. Now our problems have reached crisis proportions and Bacevich focuses on the three essential elements of the crisis: American profligacy; the political debasing of government; and the crisis in the military.

What renders Bacevich's critique particularly stinging, aside from the historical context he gives it (Bush has simply taken an enduring American exceptionalism to a new level), is that he lays these problems on the doorstep of American citizens. It is we who have elected the governments that have driven us toward near collapse. It is we who have participated willingly in the consumption frenzy in which both individual citizens and the government live beyond their means. Credit card debt is undermining both government and citizenry.

This pathway is unsustainable and this book serves up a direct and meaningful warning to this effect. Niebuhrian "realism" sees through the illusions that fuel our own individual behavior and that of our government. There are limits to American power and limits to our own individual living standards and, of course, there are limits to what the globe can sustain as is becoming evident from climate changes.

American exceptionalism is coming to an end and it will be painful for both individual citizens and our democracy and government to get beyond it. But we have no choice. Things will get worse before they get better. Bacevich suggests some of the basic ways that we need to go to reverse the path to folly. He holds out no illusions that one political party or the other, one presidential candidate or the other, has the will or the leadership qualities to change directions. It is up to American citizens to demand different policies as well as to govern our own appetites.

While this is a sobering book, it is not warning of doomsday. Our worst problems are essentially of our own making and we can begin to unmake them. But we first have to come to terms with our own exceptionalism. We cannot manage history and there are no real global problems that can be solved by military means, or certainly not by military means alone.

Without Exception
By Edwin C. Pauzer VINE VOICE on September 24, 2008

This is one of those books you might find yourself sitting down to read chapter and verse over and over again, only because the writing is so intelligent and so profound. "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism," by Andrew Bacevich, is one of those works that will enthrall the reader with its insight and analysis.

According to the author, the US has reached its limit to project its power in the world. His rationale for this conclusion are three central crises we now face: economic and cultural, political, and military, all of which are our own making.

The first crisis is one of profligacy. Americans want more, whether it is wealth, credit, markets, or oil, without consideration for cost or how these things are acquired. There is complete apathy in what policies are being produced as long as they provide plenty.

The political crisis was born of our mobilization in World War II to meet the threat of tyranny, and from the Cold War to meet the challenge of the Soviet Union. Both gave rise to unprecedented presidential power, an ineffectual Congress, and a disastrous foreign policy. Bacevich contends that our legislature no longer serves their constituents or the common good "but themselves through gerrymandering, doling out prodigious amounts of political pork, seeing to the protection of certain vested interests" with the paramount concern of being re-elected. Our presidents have been willing accomplices in keeping the American dream or greed alive by using our military as part of a coercive diplomatic tool to feed and fuel the first crisis.

Bacevich traces the end of the republic to the start of both wars, which gave rise to the "ideology of national security." The mission of the new Department of Defense is not defense, but to project power globally where we will view any nation as a threat that tries to match us in military might. At the same time, the largest intelligence agencies in the world are created to afford us more security, but after seventy years are unable to defend our cities and buildings in the US while it worries about intrigues worldwide. Competition and rivalry lead to a lack of cooperation, intelligence, and security when it was needed most.

The third crisis is our military which has been employed to satisfy the neuroses of the first and second crises. The author puts much of the blame squarely at the feet of inept military leadership, which he believes has confused strategy with operations. Content with the resilience of the American fighting man or woman, he is scathing in his critique of their leadership finding them "guilty of flagrant professional malpractice, if not outright fraud." He illustrates how improvised explosive devices that cost no more than a pizza have checked a military that is designed for speed and maneuver--that was considered invincible.

Andrew Bacevich contends that nothing will change as long as Americans are told to go to Disney World instead of making sacrifices, as long as the same one half percent of our population continue to populate the military that the president sees as his personal army, as long as an apathetic public and an ineffectual Congress continue to make periodic, grand gestures of curbing presidential power, the United States will have reached the limits of its power and exceptionalism.

This book profoundly moved me, and I was impressed by the insight that Professor Bacevich could bring in such few pages. Passages of this book should be plastered in the halls and offices of Congress, as well as the West Wing.

This book really stands out as a jewel in a sea of mediocre publications by radio and TV personalities who think they know what they are talking about when it comes to economics or geopolitics. The difference is that Andrew Bacevich does

--without exception.

Also Recommended:

The New American Militarism

There are several very insightful reviews of Bacevich latest book The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005) on Amazon. I strongly recommend to read them.

Bacevich argues that the new militarism came about because of a convergence of several social forces (and as such has significant social base):

For your convenience some of  them which I judge to be the most insightful are reproduced below:

Andrew J. Bacevich's The New American Militarism: How Americans Are seduced By War, Oxford University Press, New York, 2005, ISBN 0-19-517338-4, is the most coherent analysis of how America has come to its present situation in the world that I have ever read. Bacevich, Professor of International Relations and Director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University, is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and holds a Ph.D. in history from Princeton. And he is retired military officer. This background makes him almost uniquely qualified to comment on the subject.

Bacevich admits to an outlook of moderate conservatism. But in ascribing fault for our plight to virtually every administration since W.W. II, he is even handed and clear eyed. Since he served in the military, he understands the natural bureaucratic instincts of the best of the officer corps and is not blinded by the almost messianic status that they have achieved in the recent past.

His broad brush includes the classic period, the American Revolution - especially the impact of George Washington, but he moves quickly to the influence of Woodrow Wilson and his direct descendants of our time, the Neoconservatives. The narrative accelerates and becomes relevant for us in the depths of the despair of Vietnam. At that juncture, neocon intellectuals awakened to the horror that without a new day for our military and foreign policy, the future of America would be at stake. At almost the same time, Evangelical Christians abandoned their traditional role in society and came to views not dissimilar to the neocons. America had to get back on track to both power and goodness. The results of Vietnam on American culture, society, and - especially - values were abhorrent to both these groups.

The perfect man to idealize and mythologize America's road back was Ronald Reagan. Again, Bacevich does not shrink from seeing through the surreal qualities brought to the Oval Office by Reagan to the realities beneath them. The Great Communicator transformed the Vietnam experience into an abandonment of American ideals and reacquainted America with those who fought that horrible war. Pop culture of the period, including motion pictures such as Top Gun and best selling novels by many, including Tom Clancy completely rehabilitated the image of the military.

The author describes how Evangelical leaders came to find common cause with the neocons and provided the political muscle for Reagan and his successors of both parties to discover that the projection of military might become a reason for being for America as the last century closed.

One of his major points is that the all volunteer force that resulted from the Vietnam experience has been divorced from American life and that sending this force of ghosts into battle has little impact on our collective psyche. This, too, fit in with the intellectual throw weight of the neocons and the political power of the Evangelicals.

Separate from but related to the neocons, Bacevich describes the loss of strategic input by the military in favor of a new priesthood of intellectual elites from institutions such as the RAND Corporation, The University of Chicago and many others. It was these high priests who saw the potential that technology provided for changing the nature of war itself and how American power might be projected with `smart weapons' that could be the equivalent of the nuclear force that could never be used.

So it was that when the war we are now embroiled in across the globe - which has its antecedents back more than twenty years - all of these forces weighed heavily on the military leaders to start using the force we'd bought them. The famed question by Secretary of State Madeline Albright to General Colin Powell: "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" had to have an answer and the skirmishes and wars since tended to provide it.

Bacevich clearly links our present predicaments both at home and abroad to the ever greater need for natural resources, especially oil from the Persian Gulf. He demolishes all of the reasons for our bellicosity based on ideals and links it directly to our insatiable appetite for oil and economic expansion. Naturally, like thousands of writers before him, he points out the need for a national energy policy based on more effective use of resources and alternative means of production.

It is in his prescriptions that the book tends to drift. The Congress must do its constitutionally mandated jobs or be thrown out by the people. Some of his ideas on military education are creative and might well close the gap between the officer corps and civilians that he points to as a great problem.

But it is the clearly written analysis that makes this book shine. It should be a must read for those who wonder how we got to Iraq and where we might be heading as a society. The nation is in grave danger, and this is a book that that shows how we got to this juncture. Where we go from here is up to us. If we continue as we are, our options may narrow and be provided by others.

READ THIS BOOK

===This review is from: The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Hardcover)

In his book The New American Militarism (2005), Andrew Bacevich desacralizes our idolatrous infatuation with military might, but in a way that avoids the partisan cant of both the left and the right that belies so much discourse today. Bacevich's personal experiences and professional expertise lend his book an air of authenticity that I found compelling. A veteran of Vietnam and subsequently a career officer, a graduate of West Point and later Princeton where he earned a PhD in history, director of Boston University's Center for International Relations, he describes himself as a cultural conservative who views mainstream liberalism with skepticism, but who also is a person whose "disenchantment with what passes for mainstream conservatism, embodied in the present Bush administration and its groupies, is just about absolute." Finally, he identifies himself as a "conservative Catholic." Idolizing militarism, Bacevich insists, is far more complex, broader and deeper than scape-goating either political party, accusing people of malicious intent or dishonorable motives, demonizing ideological fanatics as conspirators, or replacing a given administration. Not merely the state or the government, but society at large, is enthralled with all things military.

Our military idolatry, Bacevich believes, is now so comprehensive and beguiling that it "pervades our national consciousness and perverts our national policies." We have normalized war, romanticized military life that formally was deemed degrading and inhuman, measured our national greatness in terms of military superiority, and harbor naive, unlimited expectations about how waging war, long considered a tragic last resort that signaled failure, can further our national self-interests. Utilizing a "military metaphysic" to justify our misguided ambitions to recreate the world in our own image, with ideals that we imagine are universal, has taken about thirty years to emerge in its present form. It is this marriage between utopians ends and military means that Bacevich wants to annul.

How have we come to idolize military might with such uncritical devotion? He likens it to pollution: "the perhaps unintended, but foreseeable by-product of prior choices and decisions made without taking fully into account the full range of costs likely to be incurred" (p. 206). In successive chapters he analyzes six elements of this toxic condition that combined in an incremental and cumulative fashion.

  1. After the humiliation of Vietnam, an "unmitigated disaster" in his view, the military set about to rehabilitate and reinvent itself, both in image and substance. With the All Volunteer Force, we moved from a military comprised of citizen-soldiers that were broadly representative of all society to a professional warrior caste that by design isolated itself from broader society and that by default employed a disproportionate percentage of enlistees from the lowest socio-economic class. War-making was thus done for us, by a few of us, not by all of us.
  2. Second, the rise of the neo-conservative movement embraced American Exceptionalism as our national end and superior coercive force as the means to franchise it around the world.
  3. Myth-making about warfare sentimentalized, sanitized and fictionalized war. The film Top Gun is only one example of "a glittering new image of warfare."
  4. Fourth, without the wholehearted complicity of conservative evangelicalism, militarism would have been "inconceivable," a tragic irony when you consider that the most "Christian" nation on earth did far less to question this trend than many ostensibly "secular" nations.
  5. Fifth, during the years of nuclear proliferation and the fears of mutually assured destruction, a "priesthood" of elite defense analysts pushed for what became known as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). RMA pushed the idea of "limited" and more humane war using game theory models and technological advances with euphemisms like "clean" and "smart" bombs. But here too our "exuberance created expectations that became increasingly uncoupled from reality," as the current Iraq debacle demonstrates.
  6. Finally, despite knowing full well that dependence upon Arab oil made us vulnerable to the geo-political maelstroms of that region, we have continued to treat the Persian Gulf as a cheap gas station. How to insure our Arab oil supply, protect Saudi Arabia, and serve as Israel's most important protector has always constituted a squaring of the circle. Sordid and expedient self interest, our "pursuit of happiness ever more expansively defined," was only later joined by more lofty rhetoric about exporting universal ideals like democracy and free markets, or, rather, the latter have only been a (misguided) means to secure the former.

Bacevich opens and closes with quotes from our Founding Fathers. In 1795, James Madison warned that "of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other." Similarly, late in his life George Washington warned the country of "those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hotile to republican liberty."

K. Johnson:

 Relevant and Objective, January 3, 2007

Author Andrew Bacevich has superb credentials on military, diplomatic, and historical issues. A Vietnam Veteran, 25+ year career in the Army and now professor of International Relations, Bacevich is one of the few that has the experience *and* knowledge to dissect what has been occurring in American socio-political culture and society for the last several decades. Bacevich notes the current focus on the military to solve the world's problems and to promote America's interests is not the sole work of a President and Congress, but the combination of culture, mentality, political, and now primarily economic, interests. This book has tons of footnoting, which allows you to delve further into these issues on your own.

The author astutely reinforces the fact that the Militarist Mentality won't change, regardless of which political party is in control of the Executive and Houses of Congress in the United States. Here only some examples out of many:

Entry of the U.S. military into the Middle East:

THE CARTER DOCTRINE:

The Carter Doctrine was prescribed at the State of the Union Address in 1980. Another civilian prescription utilizing the military as medicine to alleviate and even cure, political symptoms. This Doctrine began a new era of U.S. involvement in the Middle East, specifically using the American military to enforce its economic interests and lifestyle dependence on oil. The Carter Doctrine was a major shift in American foreign policy in the Middle East. It specifically stated that use of the military can and will be used to enforce U.S. economic interests.

At his State of the Union Address, Carter stated:

"Any attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be declared as an assault on the vital interest of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force" (p. 181).

Worth noting is that the Carter Doctrine was declared during the Cold War, when there was a adversary to check U.S interests. Today, that rival is gone.

Some argue the so-called 'War on Terror' is merely a historical continuation of American foreign policy interests in using its military to promote its geo-political and economic interests.

WAR AS SPECTATOR SPORT:

War has been, and now is presented as a spectacle. No different than a spectator sport. Live reports, video display, and laymen presentations of new technology, usually via video, to the civilian public at press conferences.

One example of many are current U.S. newspaper reports: they don't use the term "wounded" when reporting about American soldiers in Iraq. They use the euphemistic term, "injured." "17 Iraqis 'wounded' and 3 American soldiers 'injured.'" Similar to a football game. Slogans such as "Shock and Awe, Support the Troops," and deck of cards identifying the most wanted Baath party members. "Freedom is not Free." Many American military personel (and civilians) have internalized this propaganda.

Using Hollywood To Enhance "Honor" and perpetuate myths:

Bacevich carefully details the planned and choreographed footage of George W. Bush dressed as a fighter pilot on the USS Abraham Lincoln. This was intentionally and specifically lifted from the movie "Top Gun." Immediately after this planned footage, an action figure doll was created and sold for $39.99. It was called the "Elite Force Aviator: George W. Bush: U.S. President and Naval Aviator" (p. 31).

Well-dressed, handsome, and beautiful anchors report about the war in such series as "The Week in War." More simulation of the spectator sport of war in our pop culture. One segment in the "Week in War program" is called "The Fallen," where the photo of a soldier, his name, age, and hometown are presented, and the date of his death. Then the cameramen go to his family's home. Often a family picture of the "fallen soldier" is shown. Then, an interview with the somber, and at times tearful family in their living room, sitting on their couch: "He was a good kid. He always wanted to help people."

The "Fallen" is related to a concept that the Germans began about 300 years ago. This concept is called the "Cult of the Fallen Soldier." When a soldier is killed in war he is elevated to a higher status because of his death. He is placed on a pedestal, because somehow, and in some enigmatic way, he "sacrificed" for a noble cause that is often abstract or confusing to the public. To further simplify the confusion and sullenness resulting from the soldier's death, religion is often injected into the deceased soldiers elevation on a pedestal. You can see this Cult of the Fallen Soldier in Arlington, Virgina today, and in many military cemeteries around the world.

GLORIFICATION OF THE MILITARY THROUGH MOVIES:

Bacevich notes moves and their role. "Top Gun" had a tremendous impact in many ways. Pop culture, and Navy recruiting sky-rocketing. As for the flurry of "Vietnam war movies," again the noble concepts of "courage, honor, fear, triumph" are latently and explicitly reinforced to the public of all ages and socio-economic levels.

It took me a chapter or two to get used to Bacevich's writing style, but I grew to like it.

Chapters: 1) Wilsonians Under Arms 2) The Military Professions at Bay 3) Left, Right, Center 4) California Dreaming 5) Onward 6) War Club 7) Blood for Oil 8) Common Defense

"Support" for the military is often incorrectly linked with one's "patriotism." This faulty thinking is perpetuated by the electronic and print media in often subtle forms but extremely effective forms, and at times very explicit and in aggressive manners. The government intentionally steers the publics' focus to the 'Military aspects of war' to avoid attention to the more realistic and vital 'political aspects.' The latter being at the real heart of the motivation, manner, and outcome of most *political* conflicts.

Bacevich notes journalists: journalist Thomas Friedman complained that a Super Bowl half-time show did not honor the "troops." He then drove to the Command Center to visit and speak with the "troops." Soon after, he carried on with his own self-centered interests, like everyone else.

The military in and of itself is not dangerous nor pernicious. The military doesn't formulate foreign policy. The military just implements it, carrying out the orders and instructions of elitist civilians who have never served in the armed forces. It's not the military nor the men and women serving in it, we must be wary of. It's the civilians masters with vested interests in the governmental and corporate world who must be held accountable.

General Creighton Abrams wanted to diminish the influence of civilian control over the military after Vietnam. Civilians and politicians were making military decisions. It seems the situation is similar in 2007. Chairman of the JCS Peter Pace sounds political. History will be the judge.

This is a very insightful book for those interested in recent history as well as the current situation the United States is in. The troops should be supported for what they do. Because unfortunately they are the ones that pay the price for elitist decisions made by upper-class civilians from the Ivy League cliques that run the U.S. politically and economically.

Highly recommended and relevant to our contemporary times and our future.

Andrew Bacevich did excellent research and writing in this book. I'll think we'll be hearing a lot more of him. Hopefully He'll get more access to the public. If - the mainstream media allows it.

Robert S. Frey
An Informed, Insightful, and Highly Readable Account of American Foreign Policy Today, December 23, 2006

Andrew J. Bacevich's "The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War," should be read and considered carefully by every member of the national political leadership in the United States as well as by adult Americans in general. Bacevich brings impeccable credentials to his work in this book--professor of history and international relations at Boston University, West Point graduate, and veteran of the Vietnam conflict. His writing is engaging, insightful, and historically well anchored. Importantly, this work is highly accessible and eminently readable. The level of documentation is very valuable as well. Finally, the book is not about fault-finding and finger-pointing toward any one national figure or group.

What I found most beneficial was that the book presented well-argued alternative historical "meta-narratives" that are much more closely aligned with post-World War II historical events and processes than the ones currently accepted as "conventional wisdom." A case in point is the periodization of World War IV beginning with President Carter's pronouncements regarding the Persian Gulf area in 1980 rather than with the terrorist attacks on America on 9/11. "The New American Militarism" carefully and credibly brings together the many seemingly disparate actions, decisions, and events of the past 60+ years (e.g., the atomic bombing of Japan, Vietnam, oil shortages of the 1970s and 80s, the end of the Cold War, the First Gulf War, etc.) and illustrates important patterns and trends that help to explain why United States' foreign policy is what it is today. Dr. Bacevich's book helps us understand and appreciate that the global projection of American military power today has deep roots in the national decisions and behaviors of the second half of the twentieth century.

Robert S. Frey, M.A., MBA, MSM
Adjunct Professor, History
Brenau University

Dr. Lee D. Carlson

Interesting, insightful, and motivating, October 21, 2006

Why is it that some people, including this reviewer, are reluctant to criticize the writings or verbalizations of those Americans that have been or are currently in the military? This is particularly true for those officers and soldiers who have served in combat. To be critical of someone is who has faced such horror would be a sacrilege. Their opinions on subjects, especially those related to war and the military, are given much higher weight than those that have never been in the military. What is the origin of this extreme bias and does it not thwart attempts to get at the truth in matters of war and politics? If a war is illegal or immoral, are not the soldiers who participate in it themselves war criminals, deserving the severest condemnation?

The author of this book sheds light on these questions and gives many more interesting opinions on what he has called the 'new American militarism.' If one examines carefully American history, it is fair to say that Americans have been reluctant to go to war, preferring instead to settle conflicts via negotiation and trade agreements. Americans have been led to the horrors of war kicking and screaming, and breath a sigh of relief when they are over. Historically, Americans have applied extreme skepticism to those politicians, like Woodrow Wilson, who wanted to participate in World War I to make the world "safe for democracy." So if Americans are "seduced by war", as the author contends they have been in recent decades, an explanation must be found. It is tempting to say that they have been merely "brainwashed", and contemporary neuroscience lends some credence to this claim, but one must still be open to alternative explanations, and let the evidence determine the proper interpretation. Once the causes have been identified, it becomes necessary to find methodologies and strategies to counter these causes, lest we find ourselves in another unnecessary and brutal conflict, initiated by some who do not directly participate in it, and have no intention ever to do so.

This book is not a scientific study, but instead is a collection of opinions, mostly supported by anecdotal evidence, to support the author's thesis. On the surface his opinions do seem plausible, but one must still apply to his writings the same level of skepticism applied to other studies of the same kind. It does seem reasonable to believe for example that current attitudes about war are governed by the American failure in Vietnam, Carter's supposed ineptitude in dealing with the resulting loss in "self-esteem" of the American populace, and Reagan's exploitation or correction of this loss. But more evidence is needed to set such a conclusion in stone.

The author though is intellectually honest enough to admit that he has not obtained the "definitive version of the truth" on the new American militarism within the pages of his book. His words are more "suggestive than conclusive" he writes, and he welcomes criticism and alternative interpretations. Vietnam, oil and energy considerations, 9-11, and the media all have a role to play in the current American attitudes about war he argues. Further analysis though is needed, and cognizance must be made that all readers, including this reviewer, are embedded in the same culture as the author, and subjected to the same ideological, historical, and media pressures. We must be extremely cautious in our acceptance of what we find in print and indeed in all information outlets. And we must learn that soldiers, active duty or otherwise, are not infallible and must be subjected to the same criticism as any other citizen. This is again, very difficult to do, and this difficulty is perhaps the best evidence for the author's thesis.

R. Albin:

 Exceptional Polemic; 4.5 Stars, October 19, 2006

This concise and well written book is the best kind of polemic; clear, well argued, and designed to provoke debate. Bacevich is definitely interested in persuading readers of the truth of his views but his calm and invective free prose, insistence on careful documentation, and logical presentation indicate that his primary concern is promote a high level of discussion of this important issue. Bacevich argues well that a form of militarism based on an exaggerated sense of both American mission and American power, specifically military power, has infected public life. He views this militarism as both leading to unecessary and dangerous adventures abroad, epitomized by the Iraq fiasco, and corrupting the quality of domestic debate and policy making. Beyond documenting the existence of this phenomenon, Bacevich is concerned with explicating how this form of militarism, which he views as contrary to American traditions, came to be so popular.

Bacevich argues well that the new militarism came about because of a convergence of actions by a number of different actors including our professional military, neoconservative intellectuals and publicists, evangelical Christians, resurgent Republican party activists, and so-called defense intellectuals. For a variety of reasons, these sometimes overlapping groups converged on ideas of the primacy of American military power and the need to use it aggressively abroad. Bacevich devotes a series of chapters to examining each of these actors, discussing their motivations and actions, often exposing shabby and inconsistent thinking. Some of these, like the role of neoconservative intellectuals and the Religous Right, are fairly well known.

Others, like the behavior of professional military over the last generation, will be novel to many readers. Bacevich's chapters have underlying themes. One is the persisent occurrence of ironic events as the actions of many of these groups produced events counter to their goals. The post-Vietnam professional military attempted to produce a large, vigorous military poised to fight conventional, WWII-like, combats. This force was intended to be difficult for politicians to use. But as these often highly competent professionals succeeded to restoring the quality of the American military, the temptation to use it became stronger and stronger, and control escaped the professionals back into the hands of politicians as varied as Bush II and Clinton. Another theme is that politicians seized on use military force as an alternative to more difficult and politically unpalatable alternatives. Jimmy Carter is described correctly as initiating the American preoccupation with control of the Persian Gulf oil supplies, which has generated a great deal of conflict over the past generation. Bacevich presents Carter as having to act this way because his efforts to persuade Americans to pursue sacrifice and a rational energy policy were political losers. Ronald Reagan is presented as the epitome of this unfortunate trend.

Bacevich is generally convincing though, perhaps because this is a short book, there are some issues which are presented onesidely. For example, its true that Carter began the military preoccupation with the Persian Gulf. But, its true as well that his administration established the Dept. of Energy, began a significant program of energy related research, moved towards fuel standards for vehicles and began the regulatory policies that would successfully improve energy efficiency for many household items. No subsequent administration had done more to lessen dependence on foreign oil.

Bacevich also omits an important point. As he points out, the different actors that sponsored the new militarism tended to converge in the Republican Party. But, as has been pointed out by a number of analysts, the Republican Party is a highly disparate and relatively unstable coalition. The existence of some form of powerful enemy, perceived or real, is necessary to maintain Republican solidarity. The new militarism is an important component of maintaining the internal integrity of the Republican party and at unconciously appreciated as such by many important Republicans.

An interesting aspect of this book is that Bacevich, a West point grad, former career Army officer, and self-described cultural conservative, has reproduced many of the criticisms put forward by Leftist critics.

Bacevich concludes with a series of interesting recommendations that are generally rational but bound to be controversial and probably politically impossible. Again, this is an effort to change the nature of the discussion about these issues.

Adam Bahner
How Permanent Military Deployment Became Congruent With World Peace, June 29, 2006

In The New American Militarism, Andrew J. Bacevich contends that American culture and policy since the end of the Cold War has merged a militaristic ethos with a utopian global imaginary. He notes that American militarism is a "bipartisan project" with "deep roots" that even garner support on the political margins, with some leftist activists seeing a humanitarian mission for U.S. global military hegemony. He traces these roots to the worldview of Woodrow Wilson, who envisioned a globe "remade in America's image and therefore permanently at peace." Yet Wilson's view was moderated by a public and policy perception of war as an ugly, costly, brutal, traumatic and unpredictable last resort. This is corroborated by the massive military demobilizations that followed U.S. involvement in both world wars. Bacevich also points to works of popular culture, from Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front to Oliver Stone's Platoon, that reflect on the inhumanity of war from World War I through Vietnam.

Bacevich sees a massive deviation from these historical trends after the end of the Cold War. While conceding that a permanent military mobilization was expected during the Cold War (from roughly NSC-68 to the fall of the Berlin Wall)--no significant demobilization followed. Forces slated for deactivation were quickly mobilized for Operation Desert Storm. No successful popular culture critiques of that war's brutality would emerge. The author sees the end of the cold war and Desert Storm as framing a period of "new American militarism" that breaks from historical precedent in several regards. He claims that since the 1988 presidential campaign, the character of the presidency has emphasized military more than civilian leadership. This contradicts previous presidents of military stature (e.g. Grant, Eisenhower) who obsessively positioned themselves as civilians. Post-Cold War military budgets have been dramatically larger despite no global adversary. The public has uncritically accepted a permanent military stance. The perception of war as ghastly and treacherous has been replaced with war as a clinical and technologically managed spectacle. The link between the covenant of citizenship and military service has been replaced by a specialized force of volunteers. The numbers of veterans serving in congress has steadily decreased since World War II. Bacevich correlates this with the shunning of military service by elites as the military has increasingly drawn from areas of the population that are poor and brown. Because of this, force is "outsourced" and in turn the stature of soldiers has dramatically increased through an infrastructure of praise by the majority who are not involved in military operations. Senior military officers have tremendous clout in politics, policy, and spending.

To understand this new militarism, Bacevich notes that it is point-for-point an inversion of Vietnam's military milieu. There, politicians up through the president framed themselves as civilians, officers felt out of touch with bureaucratic decisions, and war was perceived as carnal and bumbling. The book traces cultural responses to Vietnam that reformed the American relationship to militarism. As military leaders like Creighton Abrams sought to mandate broad political investment for military action by creating interdependence with reserves and to limit the criteria for deployment with the Weinberger doctrine, politicians like Ronald Reagan rehabilitated an American demoralization that peaked with Carter's failed Operation Eagle Claw by invoking popular culture mythologies like Rambo.

Bacevich is unabashedly religious. He ultimately couches America's outsourced and technocratic militarism as a departure from natural Gods in the pursuit of a scientistic idol that more perfectly regulates human affairs. He openly sees in this scientism the same flaw and outcome as Communism or Fascism. He suggests that affirmation of military service across economic privilege would raise the stakes of military engagements and help to contradict the cultural illusions that form the basis of American militarism. (That war is technical, distant, clinical, predictable, outsourced, humane, and everything contrary to what writers like Remarque tell us.) He meticulously synthesizes a new paradigm that relates the difficult subjects of military policy and popular sanction. In this regard, The New American Militarism is an exciting contribution to historical scholarship.

M. Ward:

The New American Militarism - A Bipolar Look at Todays State of Affairs, February 4, 2006

Andrew J. Bacevichs', The New American Militarism, gives the reader an important glimpse of his background when he wrote that, as a Vietnam veteran, the experience baffled him and he wrote this book in an effort to "sift through the wreckage left by the war." After the Vietnam War, the author stayed in the military because he believed being an American soldier was a "true and honorable" calling. Bacevich states he is a devoted Catholic and a conservative who became disillusioned with mainstream conservatism. He also states that he believes the current political system is corrupt and functions in ways inconsistent with genuine democracy.
Bacevich states that he tried to write this book using facts in an unbiased way. However, he cautions the reader that his experiences have shaped his views and that his views are part of this book. This is a way to tell the reader that although he tried to remain unbiased, his background and biases find voice in this book. I believe the authors warning are valid; he draws heavily upon his background and biases to support his thesis.

The book is about American militarism, which Bacevich describes as the "misleading and dangerous conceptions of war, soldiers, and military institutions" that have become part of the American conscience and have `perverted' US national security policy. According to Bacevich, American militarism has subordinated the search for the common good to the permanent value of military effectiveness that will bankrupt the US economically and morally. Bacevich supports this thesis by discussing issues that have contributed to this state of affairs.
Bacevich believes the current state of American militarism has roots dating back to the Wilson administration. Wilson's vision was to remake the world in America's image. God Himself willed the universal embrace of liberal democracies and Wilson saw the US as a `divine agent' to make the world a safe and democratic place. Today, with no serious threat to keep our military forces in check, we are now, more than ever, free to spread liberal democracy using military force, if necessary.
Considering the military, Bacevich makes the point that the militarism of America is also due, in part, to the officer corps of the US military trying to rehabilitate the image and profession of the soldier after the Vietnam War. Officers attempted to do this by reversing the roles of the soldiers and the politicians that was problematic during the Vietnam War. They tried to establish the primacy of the military over the civilians in decisions as to how to use the military. The Weinberger and Powell doctrines were the manifestation of this idea by spelling out conditions for the use of the US military in combat.

Neo-conservatives further enhanced the trend of militarism. They see US power as an instrument for good and the time was right to use the military to achieve the final triumph of Wilson's idea of spreading American liberal democracy around the globe.

Religion also played a role. According to Bacevich, evangelical Protestants see the US as a Christian nation singled out by God and Americans are His chosen people. These evangelicals believed the Vietnam War was not only a military crisis, but also a cultural and moral crisis threatening our status. Evangelicals looked to the military to play a pivotal role in saving the US from internal collapse due to the higher expression of morals and values found in the military. The military would become the role model to reverse the trend of godlessness and social decay.

Another set of actors that contributed to American militarism were the defense intellectuals whose main contribution was to bring the military back under civilian control. According to Bacevich, they laid the groundwork of our current policy of `preventative war' and reinforced American militarism.
Finally, Bacevich accuses politicians of deceiving the American public as to the true nature of American militarism by wrapping militarism in the comfortable trappings of nationalism. By using labels such as the Global War on Terrorism, politicians are using a political sleight-of-hand trick to hide our true militaristic nature in patriotic terms. Bacevich concludes his book with a list of recommendations to mitigate the current trend of American militarism.

Bacevich seems to create a mosaic of conspiracy perpetrated by sinister actors aimed at deceiving an unsuspecting public as to the true nature of American militarism. Until the last chapter where Bacevich tells the reader that there is no conspiracy, it is very easy to believe there might be one lurking in the shadows. I was shocked when I reached Bacevich's recommendations. The contrast between his recommendations and the rest of the book is astounding. I was expecting highly provocative recommendations that would match the tone of the rest of the book. However, his recommendations were solid and well thought out...delivered in the calm manner one would expect from a political scientist. Nevertheless, in the end, Bacevich's message leading up to his recommendations were hard to swallow. I believe he wrote this book not to enlighten but to be provocative in order to sell books and build his status in academic circles. If Bacevich's aim was to build a convincing argument on a serious subject, he needed to be less provocative and more clinical.

David Friedman:
What is militarism? What is it, particularly as applied to today's America? West Point educated Andrew Bacevich opens his book with a concise statement: "Today as never before in their history Amercans are enthralled with military power. The global military supremacy that the United States presently enjoys . . . has become central to our national identity." This is the basic premise of The New American Militarism. Anyone who does not accept the accuracy of this statement, or is unconcerned about its implications should probably not read this book--it will only annoy them. For those, however, who are concerned about how militarism is increasingly seeping into our core values and sense of national destiny, or who are disturbed by the current glaring disconnect between what our soldiers endure "over there", and the lack of any sacrifice or inconvenience for the rest of us "over here", this book is a must-read.

Refreshingly, Bacevich approaches the new American militarism as neither a Democrat nor Republican, from neither the left nor the right. No doubt, those with a stake in defending the policy of the present Administration no matter how foolish, or in castigating it as the main source of our current militarism, will see "bias" in this book. The truth though is that Bacevich makes a genuine effort to approach his subject in a spirit of open and disinterested inquiry. He has earned the right to say, near the end of his book, that "this account has not sought to assign or impute blame." As a result, he is not stymied by the possibility of embarrassing one political side or the other by his arguments or conclusions. This leads to a nuanced and highly independent and original treatment of the subject.

In chronicling the rise of American militarism, Bacevich rightly starts with Wilson's vision of American exceptionalism: an America leading the world beyond the slaughterhouse of European battlefields to an international order of peaceful democratic states. But where President Wilson wanted to create such a world for the express purpose of rendering war obsolete, Bacevich notes that today's "Wilsonians" want to export American democracy through the use of force. He follows this overview with an insider's thumbnail history of American military thinking from Vietnam to the first Gulf war. He explains how the military in effect re-invented itself after Vietnam so as to make it far more difficult "to send the Army off to fight while leaving the country behind." Today's highly professionalized and elite force is largely the result of this thinking. In turn this professional military presented to the country and its civilian leaders a re-invented model of war: war waged with surgical precision and offering "the prospect of decision rather than pointing ineluctably toward stalemate and quagmire." Gulf War I was the triumphant culmination of this model. The unintended and ironic consequence, of course, was that war and the aggressive projection of American military power throughout the world came to be viewed by some in our nation's leadership as an increasingly attractive policy option.

The body of the book analyzes how the legitimate attempt to recover from the national trauma of Vietnam led ultimately to a militarism increasingly reflected in crucial aspects of American life. In religion he traces how a "crusade" theory of warfare has supplanted the more mainstream "just war" theory. In popular culture he discusses the rise of a genre of pop fiction and movies reflecting a glamorized and uncritical idealization of war (he examines "An Officer and A Gentleman", "Rambo: First Blood Part II", and "Top Gun" as examples). In politics he identifies the neo-conservative movement as bringing into the mainstream ideas that "a decade earlier might have seemed reckless or preposterous"; for example the idea that the United States is "the most revolutionary force on earth" with an "inescapable mission" to spread democracy -- by the sword if necessary. Bacevich calls these ideas "inverted Trotskyism", and notes that the neo-conservative movement shares with Mao the assumption that revolution springs "from the barrel of a gun".

Bacevich concludes his book with a pithy ten-point critique offered as a starting point for "a change in consciousness, seeing war and America's relationship to war in a fundamentally different way." Among his points are greater fidelity to the letter and the spirit of the Constituional provisions regarding war and the military, and increased strategic self-sufficiency for America. Perhaps the most important points of his critique are those about ending or at least reducing the current disconnect between er how we might reduce

Patrick Connor

Careful observers will note the abolute claims that lie under the surface of these criticisms. If you criticize anything about the United States, you're automatically anti-Bush. If you question the wisdom of viewing the military as a first-option in handling international problems, you're even worse: a liberal anti-Bush peacenick. History supposedly demonstrates that diplomacy never works with any "tyrant" (whatever that is), while war allegedly always work. It's just one stark claim after another, with never any gray area in the middle.

If you read the book, this "you're either with us or with the terrorists, either dream war or hate President Bush" mentality should remind you of something. It very closely resembles the description Bacevich gives of neoconservatism, which he says engenders a worldview that is constantly in crisis mode. Things are always so dire for neocons, Bacevich explains, that only two feasible options present themselves at any given time: doing what the neocons want (usually deploying military force in pursuit of some lofty but unrealistic goal), or suffering irreversible and potentially fatal setbacks to our national cause.

Is it really surprising that the reviews of this book from a neocon mindset are also the reviews giving one star to a book that sytematically critiques and upends neoconservatism?

In actuality, as many have pointed out already, Bacevich is "anti-Bush" only insomuch as he is anti-neoconservative. Bacevich openly states that he throws his full weight behind traditionally conservative issues, like small government and lower taxes. Indeed, he is a devoutly religious social conservative who himself severed twenty years in the Army officer corps. This is why his exposee on America's new militarism has so much credibility.

Since he was in the military, he knows that sometimes the military is necessary to handle situations that develop in the world. However he also understands that the military is often grossly unfit to handle certain situations. This is the main theme of his book. At its core, the story is about how, in response to Vietnam, military leaders worked frightfully hard to rebuild the military and to limit the freedom of starry-eyed civilians to use the armed forces inappropriately.

Their most important objective was to ensure that no more Wilsonian misadventures (like Vietnam) would happen. The officer corps did this by carving out a space of authority for the top brass, from which they could have unprecedented input in policy decisions, and be able to guide strategy and tactics once the military deployed into action. After ascending to a position of greater prominence, they implemented the "Weinberger Doctrine," followed by the "Powell Doctrine," both specifically tailored to avoid Vietnam-style quagmires. The Gulf War, claims Bacevich, saw the fruition of fifteen years of hard work to accomplish these reforms. And they worked beautifully.

However, the end of the last decade saw the Neo-conservatives challenge the status quo. And with the election of W. Bush, they were finally in a position where their ideas could again have a disproportionate influence on foreign policy. What we now have in Iraq is another military quagmire, where the solution must be political, but where military occupation renders political solutions impossible.

This story is about how the military profession emerged from the post-Vietnam wilderness, dazzled the world during the first Gulf War, then once again lost its independent ability to craft related policies with the arrival of Rummie and the neocons.

It's a fascinating story, and Bacevich relates it skillfully.

Andrew S. Rogers:

 Baedecker on the road to perdition, December 5, 2005

I was sorry to see Andrew J. Bacevich dismiss Chalmers Johnson's 2004 The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project) quite as quickly as he did (on page 3 of the introduction, in fact), because I think these two books, taken together, provide probably the best -- and certainly the most historically-informed -- look at the rise and consequences of American empire. I endorse "The New American Militarism" as heartily as I did "The Sorrows of Empire."

Bacevich's capsule summary of Johnson's work notwithstanding, both these books take the long view of America's international military presence and are quick to grasp one key point. As Bacevich notes on page 205, "American militarism is not the invention of a cabal nursing fantasies of global empire and manipulating an unsuspecting people frightened by the events of 9/11. Further, it is counterproductive to think in these terms -- to assign culpability to a particular president or administration and to imagine that throwing the bums out will put things right."

In several insightful chapters, Bacevich traces the rise of militarism over the course of several administrations and many decades. A former Army officer himself, the author is particularly insightful in charting the efforts of the military's officer corps to recover from the stigma of Vietnam and reshape the *ethos* of the armed services as an elite intentionally separate from, and morally superior to, the society it exists to defend. But the officers are only one of the strands Bacevich weaves together. He also looks at the influence of the "defense intellectuals;" the importance of evangelical Christians and how their view of Biblical prophecy shapes their understanding of politics; the rise of (yes) the neo-conservatives; and even the role of Hollywood in changing America's understandings of the "lessons of Vietnam" and the re-glamorization of the military in films like "Top Gun."

The author is a sharp-eyed analyst, but also an engaging writer, and he gives the reader a lot to think about. I was intrigued, for example, by his discussion of how "supporting the troops" has become the *sine qua non* of modern politics and how doing so has replaced actual military service as an indicator of one's love of country. More fundamentally, his identification and analysis of "World War III" (already over) and "World War IV" (currently underway, and declared [surprisingly] by Jimmy Carter) struck me as a remarkably useful lens for interpreting current events.

In tying his threads together, Bacevich is not afraid to make arguments and draw conclusions that may make the reader uncomfortable. As the passage I quoted above makes clear, for example, someone looking for a straightforward declaration that "It's all Bush's fault!" will have to go someplace else. As a further implication of the above passage, Bacevich argues that the "defense intellectuals," the evangelicals, and even the neocons were and are doing what they believe are most likely to promote peace, freedom, and the security of the American people. "To the extent that we may find fault with the results of their efforts, that fault is more appropriately attributable to human fallibility than to malicious intent" (p. 207). Additionally, Bacevich is unashamed of his military service, holds up several military leaders as heroes, has some choice words for the self-delusions of leftist "peace activists," and even argues that federal education loans should be made conditional on military service.

This doesn't mean the president and his fellow conservatives get off much easier, though. Bacevich is roundly critical of Bush and his administration, including Colin Powell; dismisses the Iraq invasion ("this preposterous enterprise" [p. 202]); and in a move that will probably get him crossed off the Thayer Award nominations list, suggests officer candidates be required to graduate from civilian universities instead of West Point (his alma mater) or Annapolis -- intellectually-isolated institutions that reinforce the officer caste's separation from civil society.

So this book isn't one that will blindly reinforce anyone's prejudices. In part for that reason -- but mostly for its trenchant analysis, readable prose, and broad historical view -- I'm happy to list "The New American Militarism" as one of the best and most important books I've read in some time. Perhaps even since "The Sorrows of Empire."

Izaak VanGaalen:
 Militarism and Public Opinion, August 12, 2005

According to many of the custodians of public opinion, Andrew Bacevich has earned his right to a fair hearing. Not only is he a graduate of West Point, a Vietnam veteran, and a conservative Catholic, he is a professor of international relations and a contributor to "The Weekly Standard" and "The National Review." Obviously, if he were a left-leaning anti-war Democrat and a contributor to, say, "The Nation," he wouldn't be taken seriously as a critic of American militarism - he would be merely another "blame-America-first" defeatist.

Bacevich sees militarism manifesting itself in some disquieting ways. Traditionally America has always gauged the size of its military with the magnitude of impending threats. After the Civil War, World War I and II, the military was downsized as threats receded. Not so after the fall of the Soviet Union. The military budget has continued to grow and the expenditures are greater - by some measures - than all other countries combined. American military forces are now scaling the globe and the American public seems quiet comfortable with it. And everyone else is growing uneasy.

The mindset of the current officer corps is dominant control in all areas "whether sea, undersea, land, air, space or cyberspace." In other words, supremacy in all theaters. Self-restraint has given way to the normalization of using military force as a foreign policy tool. From 1989 (Operation Just Cause) to 2002 (Operation Iraqi Freedom) there have been nine major military operations and a number of smaller ones. The end of the Cold War has given the US a preponderance of military strength (the proverbial unipolar moment) that has enamoured successive administrations with the idea of using military force to solve international problems. In earlier times, war was always an option of the last resort, now it is a preventative measure.

War, according to Bacevich, has taken on a new aesthetic. During World War I and II, and also Vietnam and Korea the battlefield was a slaughterhouse of barbarism and brutality. Now, with the advent of the new Wilsonianism in Washington, wars are seen as moments of national unity to carry out a positive agenda, almost as if it were international social work.

The modern soldier is no longer looked upon as a deadbeat or a grunt, but rather as a skilled professional who is undertaking socially beneficial work. In fact, in a poll taken in 2003, military personnel consider themselves as being of higher moral standards than the nation they serve.

In the political classes, the Republicans have traditionallly been staunchly pro-military, but now even Democrats have thrown off their ant-military inclinations. When Kerry was running for president he did not question Bush's security policies, he was actually arguing that Bush had not gone far enough. Kerry wanted to invest more in military hardware and training. Even liberal Michael Ignatieff argues that US military intervention should be used to lessen the plight of the oppressed and that we should be assisting them in establishing more representative government.

But superpowers are not altruistic; they are only altruistic to the extent that it serves their self-interest. That's probably why Ignatieff will not get much of a hearing and Bacevich will. This book should give us pause as to why the range of opinion in the America on the use of military force is so narrow. If there is one voice that stands a chance of being heeded, it is from this conservative ex-soldier. \

Douglas Doepke:

The US may have been an expansionist and aggressive power as history shows. But unlike European peers, the American public never really took to the seductions of militarism. That is, until now. This is an important and occasionally brilliant book that tells a forty-year tale of creeping over-reliance on the military. And a heck-of an important story it is. I like the way Bacevich refuses to blame the Bush administration, even though they're the ones who've hit the accelerator. Actually the trend has been in motion for some time, especially since 1980 and Reagan's revival of military glory, contrived though it was.

Each chapter deals with an aspect of this growing militariism movement. How intellectual guru Norman Podhoretz and other elites got the big engine together, how twenty million evangelical passengers abandoned tradition and got on board, and how a crew of enthusiastic neo-cons charted a destination -- nothing less than world democracy guaranteed by American military might. All in all, the ride passes for a brilliant post-cold war move. Who's going to argue with freeing up the Will of the People, except for maybe a few hundred million Sharia fanatics. Yet, it appears none of the distinguished crew sees any contradiction between dubious means and noble end, nor do they seem particularly concerned with what anybody else thinks. (Sort of like the old Soviets, eager to spread the blessings of Scientific Socialism.) However, as Bacevich pounts out, there's a practical problem here the crew is very alert to. Policing the world means building up the institutions of the military and providing a covering mystique to keep John Q. Public supportive, especially with tax dollars and blood supply. In short, the mission requires sanitizing the cops on the beat and all that goes into keeping them there. It also means overcoming a long American tradition of minding-one's-own-business and letting the virtues of democratic self-governance speak for themselves. But then, that was an older, less "responsible" America.

Bacevich's remedies harken back to those older, quieter traditions -- citizen soldiers, a real Department of Defense, a revived Department of State, and a much more modest role in international affairs.With this book, Bacevich proves to be one of the few genuine conservatives around, (a breed disappearing even faster than the ranks of genuine liberals). Much as I like the book, especially the thoughtful Preface, I wish the author had dealt more with the economic aspects of build-up and conquest. But then that might require a whole other volume, as globalization and the number of billion-dollar servicing industries expands daily. At day's end, however, someone needs to inform a CNN- enthralled public that the military express lacks one essential feature. With all its hypnotizing bells and whistles, history shows the momentum has no brakes. Lessons from the past indicate that, despite the many seductions, aggressive empires make for some very unexpected and fast-moving train wrecks. Somebody needs to raise the alarm. Thanks Mr. Bacevich for doing your part.

Still his critique of neocons is a class of its own has value in itself as it comes from professional military officer. Professor Bacevich argues  that the US new militarism which emerged after the dissolution of the USSR is the result of a convergence of actions by a number of different groups including our professional military, neoconservative intellectuals and publicists, evangelical Christians, resurgent Republican party activists, and so-called defense intellectuals (see New American Militarism).

Andrew Bacevich has a wonderful essay, in the form of an open letter to Paul Wolfowitz, in the current Harper's. You have to subscribe to read it -- but, hey, you should be subscribing to any publication whose work you value. This essay isolates the particular role Wolfowitz had in the cast of characters that led us to war. As a reminder, they included:

But Paul Wolfowitz was in a category of his own because he was the one who provided the highest-concept rationale for the war. As James Galbraith of the University of Texas has put it, "Wolfowitz is the real-life version of Halberstam's caricature of McNamara" [in The Best and the Brightest].

Bacevich's version of this assessment is to lay out as respectfully as possible the strategic duty that Wolfowitz thought the U.S. would fulfill by invading Iraq. Back before the war began, I did a much more limited version of this assessment as an Atlantic article. As Bacevich puts it now, Wolfowitz was extending precepts from his one-time mentor, Albert Wohlstetter, toward a model of how the United States could maximize stability for itself and others.

As with the best argumentative essays, Bacevich takes on Wolfowitz in a strong rather than an oversimplified version of his world-view. You have to read the whole thing to get the effect, but here is a brief sample (within fair-use limits):

With the passing of the Cold War, global hegemony seemed America's for the taking. What others saw as an option you, Paul, saw as something much more: an obligation that the nation needed to seize, for its own good as well as for the world's....

Although none of the hijackers were Iraqi, within days of 9/11 you were promoting military action against Iraq. Critics have chalked this up to your supposed obsession with Saddam. The criticism is misplaced. The scale of your ambitions was vastly greater.

In an instant, you grasped that the attacks provided a fresh opportunity to implement Wohlstetter's Precepts, and Iraq offered a made-to-order venue....In Iraq the United States would demonstrate the efficacy of preventive war.... The urgency of invading Iraq stemmed from the need to validate that doctrine before the window of opportunity closed.

Bacevich explains much more about the Wohlstetter / Wolfowitz grand view. And then he poses the challenge that he says Wolfowitz should now meet:
One of the questions emerging from the Iraq debacle must be this one: Why did liberation at gunpoint yield results that differed so radically from what the war's advocates had expected? Or, to sharpen the point, How did preventive war undertaken by ostensibly the strongest military in history produce a cataclysm?
 

Not one of your colleagues from the Bush Administration possesses the necessary combination of honesty, courage, and wit to answer these questions. If you don't believe me, please sample the tediously self-exculpatory memoirs penned by (or on behalf of) Bush himself, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Tenet, Bremer, Feith, and a small squad of eminently forgettable generals...

What would Albert [Wohlstetter] do? I never met the man (he died in 1997), but my guess is that he wouldn't flinch from taking on these questions, even if the answers threatened to contradict his own long-held beliefs. Neither should you, Paul. To be sure, whatever you might choose to say, you'll be vilified, as Robert McNamara was vilified when he broke his long silence and admitted that he'd been "wrong, terribly wrong" about Vietnam. But help us learn the lessons of Iraq so that we might extract from it something of value in return for all the sacrifices made there. Forgive me for saying so, but you owe it to your country.
 

Anyone who knows Andrew Bacevich's story will understand the edge behind his final sentence. But you don't have to know that to respect the challenge he lays down. I hope Paul Wolfowitz will at some point rise to it.

For another very valuable assessment of who was right and wrong, when, please see John Judis's piece in The New Republic.


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[Jul 03, 2021] The Godfather of Critical Race Theory

So even in 1971 corporate American understood usefulness of critical race theory and "black bolshevism" for their needs. Otherwise Bell would never get a tenure in Harvard -- the bastion of neoliberalism and corporatism.
As the theory is a typical pseudoscience in the best style of Academician Lysenko, it is natural that " Far more Americans have learned about critical race theory from its opponents than from the theorists themselves."
The idea that "struggle for racial equality is worthwhile even though it will never succeed." remiinds me Eduard Bernstein's "movement toward goal is everything; goal is nothing" see Eduard Bernstein's Revisionist Critique of Marxist Theory and Practice Bernstein was a member of the German Social Democratic party which was a particularly strong and important member of the Second International conference. Bernstein's thoughts are encapsulated in his book, Evolutionary Socialism, published in 1899.
Notable quotes:
"... ...Far more Americans have learned about critical race theory from its opponents than from the theorists themselves. ..."
"... The political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr., whose work focuses on race and inequality, wrote about a conference he attended at Harvard Law School in 1991, where "I heard the late, esteemed legal theorist, Derrick Bell, declare on a panel that blacks had made no progress since 1865. I was startled not least because Bell's own life, as well as the fact that Harvard's black law students' organization put on the conference, so emphatically belied his claim." Mr. Reed dismissed the idea as "more a jeremiad than an analysis." ..."
"... Like the French existentialist Albert Camus, who saw Sisyphus's eternal effort to roll a boulder uphill as a symbol of human endurance in an absurd world, Bell demands "recognition of the futility of action" while insisting "that action must be taken." ..."
"... To the journalist and historian James Traub, who profiled Bell for the New Republic magazine in 1993, this amounted to a recipe for paralysis: "If you convince whites that their racism is ineradicable, what are they supposed to do? And what are blacks to do with their hard-won victim status?" ..."
Jul 03, 2021 | www.wsj.com

... ... ...

In their book "Critical Race Theory: An Introduction," Mr. Delgado and Jean Stefancic list several of its core premises, including the view that "racism is ordinary, not aberrational," and that it "serves important purposes, both psychic and material, for the dominant group," that is, for white people. In recent years, these ideas have entered the mainstream thanks to the advocacy of the Black Lives Matter movement, which was catalyzed by several high-profile cases of police violence against Black people, as well as the New York Times's 1619 Project and bestselling books like Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility" and Ibram X. Kendi's "How to Be an Antiracist." Critical race theory also informs instruction at some schools and other institutions.

...Far more Americans have learned about critical race theory from its opponents than from the theorists themselves. That may be inevitable, since their writing was mostly aimed at other scholars. But at least one major work is more accessible: "Faces at the Bottom of the Well," the 1992 book by Derrick Bell, who is often described as the founder or godfather of critical race theory.

Bell died in 2011, but the response to his work foreshadows today's controversies. In "Faces," he blends the genres of fiction and essay to communicate his powerfully pessimistic sense of "the permanence of racism" -- the book's subtitle. Bell's thought has been an important influence on some of today's most influential writers on race, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michelle Alexander.

Derrick Bell was born in Pittsburgh in 1930, and after serving in the Air Force he went to work as an attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Eisenhower Justice Department. He left the job in 1959 after being told that he had to resign his membership in the NAACP to avoid compromising his objectivity. That experience reflects a major theme in Bell's work: Can traditional legal standards of objectivity and neutrality lead to justice for Black Americans, or does fighting racism require a more politically engaged, results-oriented approach to the law?

In 1971, Bell became the first Black professor to receive tenure at Harvard Law School. As he writes in "Faces," "When I agreed to become Harvard's first black faculty member I did so on the express commitment that I was to be the first, but not the last, black hired. I was to be the pioneer, the trailblazer." But the school was slow to hire more Black faculty, leading Bell to leave in protest in 1990. He ended up spending the last part of his career at NYU Law School.

... ... ...

The political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr., whose work focuses on race and inequality, wrote about a conference he attended at Harvard Law School in 1991, where "I heard the late, esteemed legal theorist, Derrick Bell, declare on a panel that blacks had made no progress since 1865. I was startled not least because Bell's own life, as well as the fact that Harvard's black law students' organization put on the conference, so emphatically belied his claim." Mr. Reed dismissed the idea as "more a jeremiad than an analysis."

In the conclusion to "Faces," Bell argues that the struggle for racial equality is worthwhile even though it will never succeed. Like the French existentialist Albert Camus, who saw Sisyphus's eternal effort to roll a boulder uphill as a symbol of human endurance in an absurd world, Bell demands "recognition of the futility of action" while insisting "that action must be taken."

To the journalist and historian James Traub, who profiled Bell for the New Republic magazine in 1993, this amounted to a recipe for paralysis: "If you convince whites that their racism is ineradicable, what are they supposed to do? And what are blacks to do with their hard-won victim status?"

... ... ...

These experiences inform "Faces at the Bottom of the Well," which is made up of nine fables, some with a science-fiction twist. In one story, a new continent emerges in the Atlantic Ocean, with an atmosphere that only African-Americans can breathe. In another, the U.S. institutes a system where whites can pay for permission to discriminate against Blacks -- a kind of cap-and-trade scheme for bigotry.

[Jun 24, 2021] One Nation Under Greed- The Profit Incentives Driving The American Police State - ZeroHedge

Jun 24, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

One Nation Under Greed: The Profit Incentives Driving The American Police State BY TYLER DURDEN THURSDAY, JUN 24, 2021 - 12:00 AM

Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."

- Frédéric Bastiat, French economist

If there is an absolute maxim by which the American government seems to operate, it is that the taxpayer always gets ripped off.

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Not only are Americans forced to " spend more on state, municipal, and federal taxes than the annual financial burdens of food, clothing, and housing combined ," but we're also being played as easy marks by hustlers bearing the imprimatur of the government.

With every new tax, fine, fee and law adopted by our so-called representatives, the yoke around the neck of the average American seems to tighten just a little bit more.

Everywhere you go, everything you do, and every which way you look, we're getting swindled, cheated, conned, robbed, raided, pickpocketed, mugged, deceived, defrauded, double-crossed and fleeced by governmental and corporate shareholders of the American police state out to make a profit at taxpayer expense.

The overt and costly signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government are all around us: warrantless surveillance of Americans' private phone and email conversations by the FBI, NSA, etc.; SWAT team raids of Americans' homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that collect and disseminate data on Americans' private transactions; and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling.

Meanwhile, the three branches of government (Executive, Legislative and Judicial) and the agencies under their command -- Defense, Commerce, Education, Homeland Security, Justice, Treasury, etc. -- have switched their allegiance to the Corporate State with its unassailable pursuit of profit at all costs and by any means possible.

By the time you factor in the financial blowback from the COVID-19 pandemic with its politicized mandates, lockdowns, and payouts, it becomes quickly apparent that we are now ruled by a government consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population and seemingly unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process.

As with most things, if you want to know the real motives behind any government program, follow the money trail.

When you dig down far enough, you quickly find that those who profit from Americans being surveilled, fined, scanned, searched, probed, tasered, arrested and imprisoned are none other than the police who arrest them, the courts which try them, the prisons which incarcerate them, and the corporations, which manufacture the weapons, equipment and prisons used by the American police state.

Examples of this legalized, profits-over-people, government-sanctioned extortion abound.

On the roads : Not satisfied with merely padding their budgets by issuing speeding tickets, police departments have turned to asset forfeiture and red light camera schemes as a means of growing their profits. Despite revelations of corruption, collusion and fraud, these money-making scams have been being inflicted on unsuspecting drivers by revenue-hungry municipalities. Now legislators are hoping to get in on the profit sharing by imposing a vehicle miles-traveled tax , which would charge drivers for each mile behind the wheel.

In the prisons : States now have quotas to meet for how many Americans go to jail. Increasing numbers of states have contracted to keep their prisons at 90% to 100% capacity . This profit-driven form of mass punishment has, in turn, given rise to a $70 billion private prison industry that relies on the complicity of state governments to keep the money flowing and their privately run prisons full , " regardless of whether crime was rising or falling ." As Mother Jones reports, "private prison companies have supported and helped write laws that drive up prison populations . Their livelihoods depend on towns, cities, and states sending more people to prison and keeping them there." Private prisons are also doling out harsher punishments for infractions by inmates in order to keep them locked up longer in order to "boost profits" at taxpayer expense . All the while, prisoners are being forced to provide cheap labor for private corporations . No wonder the United States has the largest prison population in the world .

In the schools: The security industrial complex with its tracking, spying, and identification devices has set its sights on the schools as " a vast, rich market " -- a $20 billion market, no less -- just waiting to be conquered. In fact, the public schools have become a microcosm of the total surveillance state which currently dominates America, adopting a host of surveillance technologies, including video cameras, finger and palm scanners, iris scanners, as well as RFID and GPS tracking devices, to keep constant watch over their student bodies. Likewise, the military industrial complex with its military weapons, metal detectors, and weapons of compliance such as tasers has succeeded in transforming the schools -- at great taxpayer expense and personal profit -- into quasi-prisons. Rounding things out are school truancy laws , which come disguised as well-meaning attempts to resolve attendance issues in the schools but in truth are nothing less than stealth maneuvers aimed at enriching school districts and court systems alike through excessive fines and jail sentences for "unauthorized" absences. Curiously, none of these efforts seem to have succeeded in making the schools any safer.

In the endless wars abroad : Fueled by the profit-driven military industrial complex, the government's endless wars are wreaking havoc on our communities, our budget and our police forces. Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America's expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour . Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053 . Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn't have on a military empire it can't afford. War spending is bankrupting America.

In the form of militarized police : The Department of Homeland Security routinely hands out six-figure grants to enable local municipalities to purchase military-style vehicles, as well as a veritable war chest of weaponry, ranging from tactical vests, bomb-disarming robots, assault weapons and combat uniforms. This rise in military equipment purchases funded by the DHS has, according to analysts Andrew Becker and G.W. Schulz, " paralleled an apparent increase in local SWAT teams ." The end result? An explosive growth in the use of SWAT teams for otherwise routine police matters, an increased tendency on the part of police to shoot first and ask questions later, and an overall mindset within police forces that they are at war -- and the citizenry are the enemy combatants. Over 80,000 SWAT team raids are conducted on American homes and businesses each year. Moreover, government-funded military-style training drills continue to take place in cities across the country.

In profit-driven schemes such as asset forfeiture : Under the guise of fighting the war on drugs, government agents (usually the police) have been given broad leeway to seize billions of dollars' worth of private property (money, cars, TVs, etc.) they "suspect" may be connected to criminal activity. Then -- and here's the kicker -- whether or not any crime is actually proven to have taken place, the government keeps the citizen's property, often divvying it up with the local police who did the initial seizure. The police are actually being trained in seminars on how to seize the "goodies" that are on police departments' wish lists. According to the New York Times, seized monies have been used by police to "pay for sports tickets, office parties, a home security system and a $90,000 sports car."

Among government contractors: We have been saddled with a government that is outsourcing much of its work to high-paid contractors at great expense to the taxpayer and with no competition, little transparency and dubious savings. According to the Washington Post , "By some estimates, there are twice as many people doing government work under contract than there are government workers ." These open-ended contracts, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, "now account for anywhere between one quarter and one half of all federal service contracting." Moreover, any attempt to reform the system is " bitterly opposed by federal employee unions , who take it as their mission to prevent good employees from being rewarded and bad employees from being fired."

By the security industrial complex : We're being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors. In the so-called name of "precrime," this government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government's choosing. This far-reaching surveillance, carried out with the complicity of the Corporate State, has paved the way for an omnipresent, militarized fourth branch of government -- the Surveillance State -- that came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum. That doesn't even touch on the government's bold forays into biometric surveillance as a means of identifying and tracking the American people from birth to death.

By a government addicted to power: It's a given that you can always count on the government to take advantage of a crisis, legitimate or manufactured. Emboldened by the citizenry's inattention and willingness to tolerate its abuses, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state's hands. Now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of COVID-19 lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., "we the people" may well find ourselves burdened with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves.

These injustices, petty tyrannies and overt acts of hostility are being carried out in the name of the national good -- against the interests of individuals, society and ultimately our freedoms -- by an elite class of government officials working in partnership with megacorporations that are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.

This perverse mixture of government authoritarianism and corporate profits has increased the reach of the state into our private lives while also adding a profit motive into the mix. And, as always, it's we the people, we the taxpayers, we the gullible voters who keep getting taken for a ride by politicians eager to promise us the world on a plate.

This is a far cry from how a representative government is supposed to operate.

Indeed, it has been a long time since we could claim to be the masters of our own lives. Rather, we are now the subjects of a militarized, corporate empire in which the vast majority of the citizenry work their hands to the bone for the benefit of a privileged few

Adding injury to the ongoing insult of having our tax dollars misused and our so-called representatives bought and paid for by the moneyed elite, the government then turns around and uses the money we earn with our blood, sweat and tears to target, imprison and entrap us, in the form of militarized police, surveillance cameras, private prisons, license plate readers, drones, and cell phone tracking technology.

All of those nefarious deeds by government officials that you hear about every day: those are your tax dollars at work.

It's your money that allows for government agents to spy on your emails, your phone calls, your text messages, and your movements. It's your money that allows out-of-control police officers to burst into innocent people's homes, or probe and strip search motorists on the side of the road. And it's your money that leads to Americans across the country being prosecuted for innocuous activities such as growing vegetable gardens in their front yards or daring to speak their truth to their elected officials.

Just remember the next time you see a news story that makes your blood boil, whether it's a police officer arresting someone for filming them in public, or a child being kicked out of school for attending a virtual class while playing with a toy gun, remember that it is your tax dollars that are paying for these injustices.

There was a time in our history when our forebears said "enough is enough" and stopped paying their taxes to what they considered an illegitimate government. They stood their ground and refused to support a system that was slowly choking out any attempts at self-governance, and which refused to be held accountable for its crimes against the people.

Their resistance sowed the seeds for the revolution that would follow.

Unfortunately, in the 200-plus years since we established our own government, we've let bankers, turncoats and number-crunching bureaucrats muddy the waters and pilfer the accounts to such an extent that we're back where we started.

Once again, we've got a despotic regime with an imperial ruler doing as they please.

Once again, we've got a judicial system insisting we have no rights under a government which demands that the people march in lockstep with its dictates.

And once again, we've got to decide whether we'll keep marching or break stride and make a turn toward freedom.

But what if we didn't just pull out our pocketbooks and pony up to the federal government's outrageous demands for more money?

What if we didn't just dutifully line up to drop our hard-earned dollars into the collection bucket, no questions asked about how it will be spent?

What if, instead of quietly sending in our checks, hoping vainly for some meager return, we did a little calculating of our own and started deducting from our taxes those programs that we refuse to support?

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People , if the government and its emissaries can just take from you what they want, when they want, and then use it however they want, you can't claim to be anything more than a serf in a land they think of as theirs.

This is not freedom, America.

[Jun 21, 2021] All War is for economic reasons

Jun 21, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

VetinLA , Jun 21 2021 19:25 utc | 6

Red Rider @ 2 said; "All War is for economic reasons."

Always has been, always will be. No matter the reasons given to the peons.

Max , Jun 21 2021 20:11 utc | 13

What is the fastest way to create lots of DEBT (money)? Wars, civil war, technological waves, credit bubbles (speculative, housing,...), infrastructures...

What is the real purpose of war? To capture & control more areas for EXPLOITATION? War is the fastest way to create lots of debt for all parties.

"the real value of a conflict, the true value, is in the debt it creates. You control the debt, you control everything."

Money Power = Land x Lives x Loans

Putting Afghanistan in further debt, enables it to be exploited... What are its revenue sources? Who pays for its security and infrastructure? Will NATO leave by September?

Who wants to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals, slaves to debt?

[Jun 21, 2021] The War On Afghanistan Is Lost But The U.S. Still Tries To Keep A Foot In Its Door

Jun 21, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jen , Jun 21 2021 20:17 utc | 17

Those Uyghur jihadists stuck in Idlib province in Syria and in refugee camps in Turkey are bound to get a warm welcome from the Taliban when Ankara finally ships them off to Kabul as part of this proposed "security force" to protect the airport so the CIA can continue to ship out its heroin.

Don Bacon , Jun 21 2021 20:28 utc | 20

The US MSM is ablaze with "Taliban against Afghan forces" headlines, conveniently forgetting that the Taliban are Afghan forces too, in fact they preceded the current "Afghan forces" in government until the US intervention.
So why do their guys always beat our guys? Because their guys fight for their country and our guys fight for us.
Max , Jun 21 2021 20:33 utc | 21
@ ToivoS, why did the U$A withdraw from Vietnam? There was conscription in the U$A, thereby the rich were at risk. Also, the U$A was being constrained by money creation due to the gold standard. Both of these issues have been addressed.

Name a nation that the U$A has WITHDRAWN its military after occupying it, other than Vietnam. Aren't we still in Germany, Japan, South Korea, ...?

It ain't over 'til it's over.

How much DEBT has the Afghanistan conflict created so far? In trillions? Who got that money?

Don Bacon , Jun 21 2021 20:34 utc | 22
@ CJC #10
re: . . . Turkey to retain control of airport after NATO withdraws
It's more than NATO.
The US-Taliban agreement:
The United States is committed to withdraw from Afghanistan all military forces of the United States, its allies, and Coalition partners, including all non-diplomatic civilian personnel, private security contractors, trainers, advisors, and supporting services personnel within fourteen (14) months following announcement of this agreement. . . here
Don Bacon , Jun 21 2021 20:39 utc | 24

@ Max
re: . . . why did the U$A withdraw from Vietnam?
The US had no choice because the conscription-based US Army was broken, with troops refusing to obey orders and fragging their superiors etc. . .So Washington pulled out the troops and ended the draft.

Don Bacon , Jun 21 2021 20:49 utc | 25

The US "experts" who are crying about a possible, or inevitable, return to Talban government haven't read the agreement.
The US-Taliban Agreement of Feb 29, 2020 called for all foreign forces to leave Afghanistan by May 2021, and recognized that the outcome would be a return to a Taliban government. For example one agreement condition, II-5:: "The Taliban will not provide visas, passports, travel permits, or other legal documents to those who pose a threat to the security of the United States and its allies to enter Afghanistan." . . here

Don Bacon , Jun 21 2021 22:23 utc | 35

re: Why is the US in Afghanistan?
Decades ago Washington had its own "Silk Road" strategy, to move into the -Stans in Central Asia after the uSSR breakup. There was a large interest in Kazakhstan up north, as well as the other -Stands including Afghanistan. It was of course a road to nowhere but as we know the creeps in Washington ain't too bright. There were no seaports to accommodate this road, for one thing. There were some other considerations, like an energy pipeline, but it was all just going nowhere until 9-11 came along, giving the US to do what it does worst, employ its military.

Don Bacon , Jun 21 2021 22:33 utc | 36

@ Abe 32
re: This simplistic "views" are as inaccurate as insulting.
You need to get out more.
. . .from Fragging: Why U.S. Soldiers Assaulted Their Officers in Vietnam

During its long withdrawal from South Vietnam, the U.S. military experienced a serious crisis in morale. Chronic indiscipline, illegal drug use, and racial militancy all contributed to trouble within the ranks. But most chilling of all was the advent of a new phenomenon: large numbers of young enlisted men turning their weapons on their superiors. The practice was known as "fragging," a reference to the fragmentation hand grenades often used in these assaults. . . here
Canadian Cents , Jun 21 2021 23:03 utc | 40

Glad to hear that Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan is not letting the US use Pakistan as a base for its continued machinations, in spite of heavy US pressure, and that Pakistan as a whole was saying #AbsolutelyNot. Kudos Pakistan.

According to M. K. Bhadrakumar:

"Washington is now considering the hiring of Pentagon contractors (mercenaries) to secure Kabul airport. But that will be a hugely controversial step with grave consequences, as apparent from Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan's brusque rejection of the very idea of American military presence on Pakistani soil in relation to the Afghan situation."

MKB also places all this into the context of "the US' grand project to create rings of instability in [Russia and China's] adjacent regions -- Ukraine, Belarus, Moldavia, Hong Kong, Myanmar, Afghanistan."

https://www.indianpunchline.com/fizz-is-gone-from-biden-putin-summit/

Biswapriya Purkayast , Jun 21 2021 23:27 utc | 41

*Mi 9 or Mi 17 helicopters. There is no Mi 19.

You forget the ISIS group that magically appeared in Afghanistan a few years ago. The same group that immediately attacked the Taliban, forcing the Taliban to dedicate its best forces to countering the threat instead of fighting the puppet child sex slaver Quisling warlord regime. What's more likely than continuing the occupation in the name of "fighting ISIS"? Just like Iraq was reinvaded and reoccupied in the name of "fighting ISIS" and continues to be occupied to this day?

[Jun 12, 2021] BioSecurity Fascist State

Jun 09, 2021 | www.unz.com

GMC , says: June 9, 2021 at 7:19 am GMT • 18.5 hours ago

@beavertales

My good friend in Canada says that it seems to be a "BioSecurity Fascist State" forming also. And it's not against Cuba , it's against the populace of Canada. Worse than anything in the US. < >

[Jun 12, 2021] Google Should Be Treated as Utility, Ohio Argues in New Lawsuit

Jun 08, 2021 | www.wsj.com

Google's critics have said for years that it should be treated like a public utility. On Tuesday, Ohio's attorney general filed a lawsuit asking a judge to rule that the search company is one.

The case adds to the legal woes confronting the Alphabet Inc. GOOG 0.68% subsidiary, which also faces antitrust lawsuits from the Justice Department and a separate consortium of states led by Colorado and Texas. The company is contending with cases in countries around the world where its dominance as a search provider has sparked a push by regulators to corral its power.

Amid the array of court challenges, Ohio said that it is the first state in the country to bring a lawsuit seeking a court declaration that Google is a common carrier subject under state law to government regulation. The lawsuit, which doesn't seek monetary damages, says that Google has a duty to provide the same rights for advertisements and product placement for competitors as it provides for its own services.

"When you own the railroad or the electric company or the cellphone tower, you have to treat everyone the same and give everybody access," said Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, a Republican.

A Google spokesman said that the remedies sought in the Ohio lawsuit would worsen the company's search results and impair businesses' ability to connect directly with customers. "Ohioans simply don't want the government to run Google like a gas or electric company," a spokesman said. "This lawsuit has no basis in fact or law and we'll defend ourselves against it in court."

[Jun 06, 2021] US Troops Die for World Domination, Not Freedom Consortiumnews

Notable quotes:
"... CaitlinJohnstone.com ..."
"... Please Support Our Spring Fund Drive! ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... War is a Racket ..."
"... Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix ..."
"... Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone ..."
"... Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers ..."
"... This article was re-published with permission. ..."
"... The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of ..."
Jun 06, 2021 | consortiumnews.com

US Troops Die for World Domination, Not Freedom May 31, 2021 Save

On Memorial Day, Caitlin Johnstone says it's important to block the propaganda that helps feed a steady supply of teenagers into the imperial war machine.

Airman placing U.S. flags at military graves, May 27. (Arlington National Cemetery, Flickr)

By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com

V ice President Kamala Harris spent the weekend under fire from Republicans, which of course means that Kamala Harris spent the weekend being criticized for the most silly, vapid reason you could possibly criticize Kamala Harris for.

Apparently the likely future president tweeted "Enjoy the long weekend," a reference to the Memorial Day holiday on Monday, instead of gushing about fallen troops and sacrifice.

That's it, that's the whole entire story. That silly, irrelevant offense by one of the sleaziest people in the single most corrupt and murderous government on earth is the whole entire basis for histrionic headlines from conservative media outlets like this :

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3R3ZWV0X2VtYmVkX2NsaWNrYWJpbGl0eV8xMjEwMiI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJjb250cm9sIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1398784636193488897&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fconsortiumnews.com%2F2021%2F05%2F31%2Fus-troops-die-for-world-domination-not-freedom%2F&sessionId=8c4db816a251b9ec8a405c5ae95098e3aa132642&theme=light&widgetsVersion=82e1070%3A1619632193066&width=550px

Harris, the born politician, was quick to course correct.

"Throughout our history our service men and women have risked everything to defend our freedoms and our country," the veep tweeted . "As we prepare to honor them on Memorial Day, we remember their service and their sacrifice."

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?visual=true&url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F1059031867&show_artwork=true&maxwidth=860&maxheight=1000&dnt=1&utm_campaign=wtshare&utm_medium=widget&utm_content=https%25253A%25252F%25252Fsoundcloud.com%25252Fgoing_rogue%25252Fus-troops-die-for-world-domination-not-freedom&utm_source=caitlinjohnstone.com

Listen to this article.

Which is of course complete bullshit. It has been generations since any member of the U.S. military could be said to have served or sacrificed defending America or its freedoms, and that has been the case throughout almost the entirety of its history. If you are reading this it is statistically unlikely that you are of an age where any U.S. military personnel died for any other reason than corporate profit and global domination, and if you are it's almost certain you weren't old enough to have had mature thoughts about it at the time.

Please Support Our Spring Fund Drive!

Whenever you criticize the U.S. war machine online within earshot of anyone who's sufficiently propagandized, you will invariably be lectured about the second World War and how we'd all be speaking German or Japanese without the brave men who died for our freedom. This makes my point for me: the fact that apologists for U.S. imperialism always need to reach all the way back through history to the cusp of living memory to find even one single example of the American military being used for purposes that weren't evil proves that it most certainly is evil.

But this is one of the main reasons there are so very many movies and history documentaries made about World War II: it's an opportunity to portray U.S. servicemen bravely fighting and dying for a noble cause without having to bend the truth beyond recognition. The other major reason is that focusing on the second World War allows members of the U.S. empire to escape into a time when the Big Bad Guy on the world stage was someone else.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-1&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3R3ZWV0X2VtYmVkX2NsaWNrYWJpbGl0eV8xMjEwMiI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJjb250cm9sIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1399109694334046211&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fconsortiumnews.com%2F2021%2F05%2F31%2Fus-troops-die-for-world-domination-not-freedom%2F&sessionId=8c4db816a251b9ec8a405c5ae95098e3aa132642&theme=light&widgetsVersion=82e1070%3A1619632193066&width=550px

From the end of World War II to the fall of the U.S.S.R., the U.S. military was used to smash the spread of communism and secure geostrategic interests toward the ultimate end of engineering the collapse of the Soviet Union. After this was accomplished in 1991, U.S. foreign policy officially shifted to preserving a unipolar world order by preventing the rise of any other superpower which could rival its might.

A 1992 article by The New York Times titled " U.S. Strategy Plan Calls For Insuring No Rivals Develop ," reporting on a leaked document which describes a policy known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine after then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz, reads as follows:

"In a broad new policy statement that is in its final drafting stage, the Defense Department asserts that America's political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to insure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territory of the former Soviet Union.

A 46-page document that has been circulating at the highest levels of the Pentagon for weeks, and which Defense Secretary Dick Cheney expects to release later this month, states that part of the American mission will be 'convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.'

The classified document makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy."

This is all U.S. troops have been fighting and dying for since the Berlin Wall came down. Not "freedom", not "democracy" and certainly not the American people. Just continual uncontested domination of this planet at all cost: domination of its resources, its trade routes, its seas, its air, and its humans, no matter how many lives need to risked and snuffed out in order to achieve it. The U.S. has killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century in the reckless pursuit of that goal.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/26O-2SVcrw0?enablejsapi=1&autoplay=0&cc_load_policy=0&iv_load_policy=1&loop=0&modestbranding=1&fs=1&playsinline=0&controls=1&color=red&rel=0&autohide=2&theme=dark&

And, as Smedley Butler spelled out 86 years ago in his still-relevant book War is a Racket , U.S. military personnel have been dying for profit.

Nothing gets the gears of industry turning like war, and nothing better creates chaotic Wild West environments of shock and confusion during which more wealth and power can be grabbed. War profiteers pour immense resources into lobbying , think tanks and campaign donations to manipulate and bribe policy makers into making decisions which promote war and military expansionism, with astounding success . This is all entirely legal.

It's important to spread awareness that this is all U.S. troops have been dying for, because the fairy tale that they fight for freedom and for their countrymen is a major propaganda narrative used in military recruitment. While poverty plays a significant role in driving up enlistments as predatory recruiters target poor and middle class youth promising them a future in the nation with the worst income inequality in the industrialized world, the fact that the aggressively propagandized glorification of military "service" makes it a more esteemed career path than working at a restaurant or a grocery store means people are more likely to enlist.

Without all that propaganda deceiving people into believing that military work is something virtuous, military service would be the most shameful job anyone could possibly have; other stigmatized jobs like sex work would be regarded as far more noble. You'd be less reluctant to tell your extended family over Christmas that you're a janitor at a seedy massage parlor than that you've enlisted in the U.S. military, because instead of congratulating and praising you, your Uncle Murray would look at you and say, "So you're gonna be killing kids for crude oil?"

And that's exactly how it should be. Continuing to uphold the lie that U.S. troops fight and die for a good cause is helping to ensure a steady supply of teenagers to feed into the gears of the imperial war machine. Stop feeding into the lie that the war machine is worth killing and being killed for. Not out of disrespect for the dead, but out of reverence for the living.

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium . Her work is entirely reader-supported , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook , following her antics on Twitter , checking out her podcast on either Youtube , soundcloud , Apple podcasts or Spotify , following her on Steemit , throwing some money into her tip jar on Patreon or Paypal , purchasing some of her sweet merchandise , buying her books Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix , Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers .

This article was re-published with permission.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News .



Em , June 1, 2021 at 09:52

Instead of annually memorializing those dead youth, who were, in one way or the other, coerced to go off to foreign lands to kill or be killed, by other youth, in the name of a piece of dead symbolic cloth, wouldn't it be a better idea to honor them, while alive in the prime of living (the world over) by affording them the means to learn, leading by example, to discover for themselves – how to think critically as to what the real options are, collectively as well as individually, for survival and thriving.

CNfan , June 1, 2021 at 04:06

"Global domination" for the benefit of a predatory financial oligarchy.

Peter Loeb , June 1, 2021 at 09:11

Read William Hartung's "Prophets of War " to understand the dynamics.

Peter in Boston

Thom Williams , May 31, 2021 at 20:12

Re: CorsortiumNews, Joe Lauria, Caitlin Johnstone, Realist, & Rael Nidess, M.D.

Thank you all for speaking your truth in this dystopian human universe so apparently lacking human reason and understanding. As is so wisely introduced and recognized herein, the murderous depravity of the "Wolfwitz Doctrine" being and remaining the public policy formulation of our national governance, both foreign and domestic, is a fact that every U.S. citizen should consider and understand on this Memorial Day.
As Usual,
EA

Realist , May 31, 2021 at 17:27

Well stated, perfectly logical again on this subject as always, Caitlin. You out the warmongers for their game to fleece the public and rape the world all so a handful of already fat, lazyass but enormously wealthy and influential people can acquire, without the slightest bit of shame, yet more, more and more of everything there is to be had. You and General Butler.

Will this message get through, this time? Maybe the billionth time is the charm, eh? Can the scales suddenly fall from the eyes of the 330 million Americans who will then demand an immediate end to the madness? On the merits, it's the only conclusion that might realise any actual justice for our country and the rest of the world upon whose throat it keeps a knee firmly planted.

Sorry, nothing of the sort shall ever happen, not as long as the entire mercenary mass media obeys its corporate ownership and speaks nothing but false narratives every minute of every day. Not as long as the educational system is really nothing more than a propaganda indoctrination experience for every child born in the glorious USA! Not as long as every politician occupying any given office is just a bought and paid for tool of the Matrix with great talents for convincing the masses that 2 + 2 = 3, or 5, or whatever is convenient at the time to benefit the ledgers of their plutocrat masters.

What better illustrates the reality of my last assertion than the occupancy of the White House by Sleepy/Creepy Joe Biden who, through age alone, has been reduced to nothing more than a sack of unresponsive meat firmly trussed up with ropes and pulleys that his handlers pull this way or that to create an animatronic effect apparently perfectly convincing to the majority of the American public? Or so they say, based upon some putative election results.

Truly, thanks for the effort, Caitlin. I do appreciate that some have a grasp on the truth. I look forward to its recapitulation by yourself and many others to no effect on every Memorial Day in the USA. It would be unrealistic of me to say otherwise.

Rael Nidess, M.D. , May 31, 2021 at 12:54

Kudos for being one of a very few to mention the central driving ethic behind U.S. foreign policy since the demise of the USSR: The Wolfowitz Doctrine. As central today as it was when first published.

[Jun 06, 2021] The Cover-Up Continues- The Truth About Bill Gates, Microsoft, and Jeffrey Epstein by Whitney Webb

Notable quotes:
"... Vanity Fair ..."
"... After Epstein's 2019 arrest, it emerged that Epstein had "directed" Bill Gates to donate $2 million to the MIT lab in 2014. Epstein also allegedly secured a $5 million donation from Leon Black for the lab. Ito was forced to resign his post as the lab's director shortly after Epstein's 2019 arrest. ..."
"... Epstein appears to have become involved with Brockman as early as 1995, when he helped to finance and rescue a struggling book project that was managed by Brockman. ..."
"... According to former Israeli intelligence operative Ari Ben-Menashe, Bill Clinton had been the main focus of Epstein's sexual blackmail operation in the 1990s, a claim supported by Epstein victim testimony and Epstein's intimate involvement with individuals who were close to the former president at the time. ..."
"... Despite tensions arising from the Clinton administration's pursuit of Microsoft's monopoly in the late 1990s, the Gates and Clinton relationship had thawed by April 2000, when Gates attended the White House " Conference on the New Economy ." Attendees besides Gates included close Epstein associate Lynn Forester (now Lady de Rothschild) and then secretary of the treasury Larry Summers, who has also come under fire for his Epstein ties. ..."
"... Huffington Post ..."
"... Huffington Post ..."
"... Black was deeply tied to Epstein, even having Epstein manage his personal "philanthropic" foundation for several years, even after Epstein's first arrest. ..."
"... Indeed, 2013 was also the year that the Gates mansion systems engineer, Rick Allen Jones, began to be investigated by Seattle police for his child porn and child rape collection, which contained over six thousand images and videos. Despite the gravity of his crime, when Jones was arrested at the Gates mansion a year later, he was not jailed after his arrest but was merely ordered "to stay away from children," according to local media reports. From Melinda's perspective, this scandal, combined with Bill Gates's growing association with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein may have posed a threat to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's reputation, well before Epstein's 2019 arrest. ..."
"... Evening Standard ..."
"... The likely reason for the continued cover-up of the true extent of Epstein's ties to Gates has much more to do with Gates's company Microsoft than with Bill Gates himself. While it is now permissible to report on ties that discredit Gates's personal reputation, the information that could tie his relationship with Epstein and the Maxwells to Microsoft has been omitted. ..."
"... If, as the Evening Standard ..."
"... This is hardly an isolated incident, as similar efforts have been made to cover up (or memory hole) the ties of Epstein and the Maxwells to other prominent Silicon Valley empires, such as those led by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk . One key reason for this is that the Epstein network's blackmail operation involved not only sexual blackmail but electronic forms of blackmail ..."
"... That Isabel and Christine Maxwell were able to forge close business ties with Microsoft after having been part of the front company that played a central role in PROMIS-related espionage and after explicitly managing their subsequent companies with the admitted intention to "rebuild" their spy father's work and legacy, strongly points to the probability of at least some Microsoft products having been compromised in some fashion, likely through alliances with Maxwell-run tech companies. The lack of mainstream media concern over the documented ties of the Epstein network to other top Microsoft executives of the past, such as Nathan Myhrvold, Linda Stone, and Steven Sinofsky, makes it clear that, while it may be open season on the relationship between Bill Gates and Epstein, such is not the case for Microsoft and Epstein. ..."
"... The ties of Epstein and the Maxwells to Silicon Valley, not just to Microsoft, are part of a broader attempt to cover up the strong intelligence component in the origin of Silicon Valley's most powerful companies. Much effort has been invested in creating a public perception that these companies are strictly private entities despite their deep, long-standing ties to the intelligence agencies and militaries of the United States and Israel . The true breadth of the Epstein scandal will never be covered by mainstream media because so many news outlets are owned by these same Silicon Valley oligarchs or depend on Silicon Valley for online reader engagement. ..."
"... Perhaps the biggest reason why the military/intelligence origins and links to the current Silicon Valley oligarchy will never be honestly examined, however, is that those very entities are now working with breakneck speed to usher in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which would make artificial intelligence, automation, mass electronic surveillance, and transhumanism central to human society. One of the architects of this "revolution," Klaus Schwab, said earlier this year that rebuilding and maintaining trust with the public was critical to that project. However, were the true nature of Silicon Valley, including its significant ties to serial child rapist and sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein and his network, to emerge, the public's trust would be significantly eroded, thus threatening what the global oligarchy views as a project critical to its survival ..."
"... What a menace these philanthropic organizations are to the ordinary and lowly. These billionaire creeps never stop plotting and figuring out even more ways to stomp on people and push their creepy agendas, which remain forever hidden. ..."
Jun 06, 2021 | www.unz.com

It further appears that Bill Gates, then head of Microsoft, made a personal investment in CommTouch at the behest of Isabel Maxwell. In an October 2000 article published in the Guardian , Isabel "jokes about persuading Bill Gates to make a personal investment" in CommTouch sometime during this period.

The Guardian article then oddly notes, regarding Isabel Maxwell and Bill Gates:

"In a faux southern belle accent, [Isabel] purrs: 'He's got to spend $375m a year to keep his tax-free status, why not allow me to help him.' She explodes with laughter."

Given that individuals as wealthy as Gates cannot have "tax-free status" and that this article was published soon after the creation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Isabel's statements suggest that it was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, which manages the foundation's endowment assets, that made this sizable investment in CommTouch.

Furthermore, it is worth highlighting the odd way in which Isabel describes her dealings with Gates ("purring," speaking in a fake Southern accent), describing her interactions with him in a way not found in any of her numerous other interviews on a wide variety of topics. This odd behavior may be related to Isabel's previous interactions with Gates and/or the mysterious relationship between Gates and Epstein during this time.

Isabel Maxwell as CommTouch President

After 2000, CommTouch's business and clout expanded rapidly, with Isabel Maxwell subsequently crediting investments from Microsoft, led by Gates, and Paul Allen for the company's good fortune and the success of its effort to enter the US market. Maxwell, as quoted in the 2002 book Fastalliances , states that Microsoft viewed CommTouch as a key "distribution network," adding that "Microsoft's investment in us put us on the map. It gave us instant credibility, validated our technology and service in the marketplace." By this time, Microsoft's ties to CommTouch had deepened with new partnerships, including CommTouch's hosting of Microsoft Exchange .

Though Isabel Maxwell was able to secure lucrative investments and alliances for CommTouch and saw its products integrated into key software and hardware components produced and sold by Microsoft and other tech giants, she was unable to improve the company's dire financial situation, with CommTouch netting a loss of $4.4 million in 1998 and similar losses well into the 2000s, with net losses totalling $24 million in 2000 (just one year after the sizable investments from Microsoft, Paul Allen and Gates). The losses continued even after Isabel formally left the company and became president emeritus in 2001. By 2006, the company was over $170 million in debt. Isabel Maxwell left her position at CommTouch in 2001 but for years retained a sizable amount of CommTouch stock valued at the time at around $9.5 million . Today, Isabel Maxwell is, among other things, a " technology pioneer " of the World Economic Forum.

Epstein, Edge, and Nathan Myhrvold

Another indication of a relationship between Epstein and Gates prior to 2001 is Epstein's cozy ties with Nathan Myhrvold, who joined Microsoft in the 1980s and became the company's first chief technology officer in 1996. At the time, Myhrvold was one of Gates's closest advisers, if not the closest, and cowrote Gates's 1996 book, The Road Ahead , which sought to explain how emerging technologies would impact life in the years and decades to come.

In December of the same year that he became Microsoft's CTO, Myhrvold traveled on Epstein's plane from Kentucky to New Jersey, and then again in January 1997 from New Jersey to Florida. Other passengers accompanying Myhrvold on these flights included Alan Dershowitz and "GM," presumably Ghislaine Maxwell. It is worth keeping in mind that this is the same period when Gates had a documented relationship with Ghislaine's sister Isabel.

In addition, in the 1990s, Myhrvold traveled with Epstein in Russia alongside Esther Dyson , a digital technology consultant who has been called "the most influential woman in all the computer world." She currently has close ties to Google as well as the DNA testing company 23andme and is a member of and agenda contributor to the World Economic Forum. Dyson later stated that the meeting with Epstein had been planned by Myhrvold. The meeting appears to have taken place in 1998, based on information posted on Dyson's social media accounts. One photo features Dyson and Epstein, with a time stamp indicating April 28, 1998, posing with Pavel Oleynikov, who appears to have been an employee of the Russian Federal Nuclear Center. In that photo, they are standing in front of the house of the late Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear scientist and dissident, who is alleged to have had ties to US intelligence. Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, were supporters of Zionist causes .

The photos were taken in Sarov, where the Russian Federal Nuclear Center is based. That same day, another photo was taken that shows Epstein inside a classroom full of teens, apparently also in Sarov, given the time stamp.

Another Dyson image , one without a visible time stamp but with a caption stating the photo was taken "at Microsoft Russia in Moscow" in April 1998, shows Nathan Myhrvold. Dyson's caption further states, "This was the beginning of a three-week trip during which Nathan and a variety of hangers-on (including a bodyguard) explored the state of post-Soviet science." Epstein appears to be one of the "hangers-on," given the photographs, dates, and the described purpose of the trip.

Myhrvold and Epstein apparently had more in common than an interest in Russian scientific advances. When Myhrvold left Microsoft to cofound Intellectual Ventures, Vanity Fair reported that he had received Epstein at the firm's office with "young girls" in tow who appeared to be "Russian models." A source close to Myhrvold and cited by Vanity Fair claimed that Myhrvold spoke openly about borrowing Epstein's jet and staying at his homes in Florida and New York. Vanity Fair also noted that Myhrvold has been accused of having sex with minors provided by Epstein by none other than Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who stands accused of the same crime and who had previously flown with Myhrvold on Epstein's private plane.

In addition, a former colleague of Myhrvold's at Microsoft later developed her own ties to Epstein. Linda Stone , who joined Microsoft in 1993 and worked directly under Myhrvold, eventually became a Microsoft vice president. She introduced Epstein to Joi Ito of the MIT Media Lab after Epstein's first arrest. "He has a tainted past, but Linda assures me that he's awesome," Ito later said in an email to three MIT staffers. In Epstein's famous little black book, there are several phone numbers for Stone, and her emergency contact is listed as Kelly Bovino, a former model and alleged Epstein coconspirator. After Epstein's 2019 arrest, it emerged that Epstein had "directed" Bill Gates to donate $2 million to the MIT lab in 2014. Epstein also allegedly secured a $5 million donation from Leon Black for the lab. Ito was forced to resign his post as the lab's director shortly after Epstein's 2019 arrest.

Nathan Myhrvold , Linda Stone , Joi Ito, Esther Dyson , and Bill Gates were all members of the Edge Foundation community (edge.org website), alongside several other Silicon Valley icons. Edge, which is described as an exclusive organization of intellectuals " redefining who and what we are ," was created by John Brockman, a self-described "cultural impresario" and noted literary agent. Brockman is best known for his deep ties to the art world in the late 1960s, though lesser known are his various "management consulting" gigs for the Pentagon and White House during that same period. Edge, which the Guardian once called "the world's smartest website," is an exclusive online symposium affiliated with what Brockman calls "the Third Culture." Epstein appears to have become involved with Brockman as early as 1995, when he helped to finance and rescue a struggling book project that was managed by Brockman.

Edge, however, is more than just a website. For decades, it was also instrumental in bringing together tech executives, scientists who were often Brockman's clients, and Wall Street financiers through its Millionaires' Dinner, first held in 1985. In 1999, this event rebranded as the Billionaires' Dinner, and Epstein became intimately involved in these affairs and the Edge Foundation itself. Epstein was photographed attending several of the dinners as was Sarah Kellen, Ghislaine Maxwell's chief "assistant" and coconspirator in the Epstein/Maxwell-run sex trafficking and blackmail scheme.

Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft and Jeffrey Epstein at the 2000 Edge Billionaires' Dinner Source: https://www.edge.org/igd/1200

From 2001 to 2017, Epstein funded $638,000 out of a total of $857,000 raised by Edge. During this period, there were several years when Epstein was Edge's only donor. Epstein stopped giving in 2015, which was incidentally the same year that Edge decided to discontinue its annual Billionaires' Dinner tradition. In addition, the only award Edge has ever given out, the $100,000 Edge of Computation prize, was awarded in 2005 to Quantum computing pioneer David Deutsch -- it was funded entirely by Epstein. A year before he began donating heavily to Edge, Epstein had created the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation to "fund and support cutting edge science around the world."

Since the Epstein scandal, regular attendees of the Billionaires' Dinner, sometimes called the Edge annual dinner, have referred to the event as an "influence operation." If one follows the money, it appears it was an influence operation largely benefitting one man, Jeffrey Epstein, and his network. The evidence points toward Myhrvold and Gates as being very much a part of that network, even before Epstein's involvement in Edge increased significantly.

A Tale of Two Bills

It is worth exploring the ties between the "philanthropic" endeavors of Bill Gates and Bill Clinton in the early 2000s, particularly given Epstein's and Ghislaine Maxwell's ties to the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative during that period. According to former Israeli intelligence operative Ari Ben-Menashe, Bill Clinton had been the main focus of Epstein's sexual blackmail operation in the 1990s, a claim supported by Epstein victim testimony and Epstein's intimate involvement with individuals who were close to the former president at the time.

Bill Gates at the White House Conference on the New Economy in 2000, Source: LA Times

Despite tensions arising from the Clinton administration's pursuit of Microsoft's monopoly in the late 1990s, the Gates and Clinton relationship had thawed by April 2000, when Gates attended the White House " Conference on the New Economy ." Attendees besides Gates included close Epstein associate Lynn Forester (now Lady de Rothschild) and then secretary of the treasury Larry Summers, who has also come under fire for his Epstein ties. Another attendee was White House chief of staff Thomas "Mack" McLarty, whose special assistant Mark Middleton met with Epstein at least three times at the Clinton White House. Middleton was fired after press reports surfaced detailing his ties to illegal donations linked to foreign governments that had been made to Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign. Another participant in the conference was Janet Yellen, Biden's current Secretary of the Treasury.

Gates spoke at a conference panel entitled "Closing the Global Divide: Health, Education and Technology." He discussed how the mapping of the human genome would result in a new era of technological breakthroughs and discussed the need to offer internet access to everyone to close the digital divide and allow the "new" internet-based economy to take shape. At the time, Gates was backing a company , along with American Telecom billionaire Craig McCaw, that hoped to establish a global internet service provider monopoly through a network of low-orbit satellites. That company, Teledesic, shut down between 2002 and 2003 and is credited as being the inspiration for Elon Musk's Starlink.

Bill Clinton and Bill Gates entered the world of philanthropy around the same time, with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launching in 2000 and the Clinton Foundation, in 2001. Not only that but Wired described the two foundations as being "at the forefront of a new era in philanthropy, in which decisions -- often referred to as investments -- are made with the strategic precision demanded of business and government, then painstakingly tracked to gauge their success."

Other media outlets, however, such as the Huffington Post , challenged that these foundations engaged in "philanthropy" and asserted that calling them such was causing "the rapid deconstruction of the accepted term." The Huffington Post further noted that the Clinton Global Initiative (part of the Clinton Foundation), the Gates Foundation, and a few similar organizations "all point in the direction of blurring the boundaries between philanthropy, business and non-profits." It noted that this model for "philanthropy" has been promoted by the World Economic Forum and the Milken Institute. It is also worth noting that several of Epstein's own "philanthropic" vehicles were also created just as this new era in philanthropy was beginning.

The Milken Institute was founded by Michael Milken , the notorious Wall Street "junk bond king," who was indicted on 98 counts of racketeering and securities fraud in 1989. He served little prison time and was ultimately pardoned by Donald Trump. Milken committed his crimes while working alongside Leon Black and Ron Perelman at Drexel Burnham Lambert before its scandalous collapse. Black was deeply tied to Epstein, even having Epstein manage his personal "philanthropic" foundation for several years, even after Epstein's first arrest. Perelman was a major Clinton donor whose 1995 fundraiser for the then president was attended by Epstein and whose companies offered jobs to Webster Hubbell and Monica Lewinsky after their respective scandals in the Clinton administration. Like Gates, Milken has transformed his reputation for ruthlessness in the corporate world into one of a "prominent philanthropist." Much of his "philanthropy" benefits the Israeli military and illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine.

Years after creating their foundations, Gates and Clinton discussed how they have "long bonded over their shared mission" of normalizing this new model of philanthropy. Gates spoke to Wired in 2013 about "their forays into developing regions" and "cites the close partnerships between their organizations." In that interview, Gates revealed that he had met Clinton before he had become president, stating, "I knew him before he was president, I knew him when he was president, and I know him now that he's not president."

Also in that interview, Clinton stated that after he left the White House he sought to focus on two specific things. The first is the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), which he stated exists "thanks largely to funding from the Gates Foundation," and the second is the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), "where I try to build a global network of people to do their own thing."

The Clinton Health Access Initiative first received an $11 million donation from the Gates Foundation in 2009. Over the last twelve years, the Gates Foundation has donated more than $497 million to CHAI. CHAI was initially founded in 2002 with the mission of tackling HIV/AIDS globally through "strong government relationships" and addressing "market inefficiencies." The Gates Foundation's significant donations, however, began not long after CHAI's expansion into malaria diagnostics and treatments. Notably, in 2011, Tachi Yamada, the former president of the Gates Foundation's Global Health program, joined CHAI's board alongside Chelsea Clinton.

Bill Gates and Bill Clinton at the annual Clinton Global Initiative in 2010

Regarding the CGI, Epstein's defense lawyers argued in court in 2007 that Epstein had been "part of the original group that conceived of the Clinton Global Initiative," which was first launched in 2005. Epstein's lawyers described the CGI as a project "bringing together a community of global leaders to devise and implement innovative solutions to some of the world's most pressing challenges." The Gates Foundation gave the CGI a total of $2.5 million between 2012 and 2013 in addition to its massive donations to the CHAI and an additional $35 million to the Clinton Foundation itself. In addition to the Gates Foundation donations, Gates's Microsoft has been intimately involved in other "philanthropic" projects backed by Clinton.

In addition to these ties, Hillary Clinton established a partnership between the Clinton Foundation and the Gates Foundation in 2014 as part of the Clintons' No Ceilings initiative. That partnership sought to "gather and analyze data about the status of women and girls' participation around the world" and involved the two foundations working "with leading technology partners to collect these data and compile them." Months before the partnership was announced, Gates and Epstein met for dinner and discussed the Gates Foundation and philanthropy, according to the New York Times . During Hillary Clinton's unsuccessful run for president in 2016, both Bill and Melinda Gates were on her short list as potential options for vice president.

In addition, Epstein attempted to become involved in the Gates Foundation directly, as seen by his efforts to convince the Gates Foundation to partner with JP Morgan on a multibillion-dollar "global health charitable fund" that would have resulted in hefty fees paid out to Epstein, who was very involved with JP Morgan at the time. Though that fund never materialized, Epstein and Gates did discuss Epstein becoming involved in Gates's philanthropic efforts. Some of these contacts were not reported by the mainstream press until after the Bill and Melinda Gates divorce announcement. Yet, as mentioned, it was known that Epstein had "directed" Gates to donate to at least one organization -- $2 million in 2014 to the MIT Media Lab.

Recent revelations about Gates and Epstein meetings that took place between 2013 and 2014 have further underscored the importance Epstein apparently held in the world of billionaire "philanthropy," with Gates reportedly claiming that Epstein was his "ticket" to winning a Nobel Prize. Norwegian media, however, reported in October 2020 that Gates and Epstein had met the Nobel Committee chair, which failed to make a splash in international media at the time. It is worth asking if Epstein managed to arrange such meetings with other individuals who also coveted Nobel Prizes and if any such individuals later received those prizes. If Epstein had such connections, it is unlikely that he would use them only once in the case of Bill Gates, given the vastness of his network, particularly in the tech and science worlds.

The year 2013 is also when Bill and Melinda Gates together met with Epstein at his New York residence, after which Melinda allegedly began asking her soon-to-be ex-husband to distance himself from Epstein. While the stated reason for this, in the wake of the Gateses' divorce announcement, was that Melinda was put off by Epstein's past and his persona, it could potentially be related to other concerns about Melinda's reputation and that of the foundation that shares her name.

Indeed, 2013 was also the year that the Gates mansion systems engineer, Rick Allen Jones, began to be investigated by Seattle police for his child porn and child rape collection, which contained over six thousand images and videos. Despite the gravity of his crime, when Jones was arrested at the Gates mansion a year later, he was not jailed after his arrest but was merely ordered "to stay away from children," according to local media reports. From Melinda's perspective, this scandal, combined with Bill Gates's growing association with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein may have posed a threat to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's reputation, well before Epstein's 2019 arrest.

2013 was also the year that the Maxwells become involved in the Clinton Foundation. That year, Ghislaine Maxwell's TerraMar Project, which officially supported UN Sustainable Development Goals as they relate the world's oceans, made a $1.25 million commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative as part of an effort to form a Sustainable Oceans Alliance. TerraMar shut down shortly after Epstein's 2019 arrest.

Isabel Maxwell and Al Seckel at the World Economic Forum's 2011 Annual Meeting

Notably, Ghislaine's TerraMar Project was in many ways the successor to Isabel Maxwell's failed Blue World Alliance, which was also ostensibly focused on the world's oceans. Blue World Alliance was set up by Isabel and her now deceased husband Al Seckel, who had hosted a "scientific conference" on Epstein's island. The Blue World Alliance also went under the name Globalsolver Foundation, and Xavier Malina, Christine Maxwell's son, was listed as Globalsolver's liaison to the Clinton Foundation. He was previously an intern at the Clinton Global Initiative.

Malina later work ed in the Obama administration at the Office of White House Personnel. He now works for Google. It is also worth noting that during this same period, Isabel Maxwell's son, Alexander Djerassi , was chief of staff at the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs in the Hillary Clinton–run State Department.

Gates Science and Epstein Science

While the Gates Foundation and the Clinton Foundation intermingled, and the latter had ties to Epstein and Maxwell, it also appears that Epstein had significant influence over two of the most prominent science advisers to Bill Gates over the last fifteen years -- Melanie Walker and Boris Nikolic.

A screenshot from a 2019 presentation Melanie Walker gave for Rockefeller Foundation, where she is a fellow. Source: YouTube

Melanie Walker , now a celebrated neurosurgeon, met Jeffrey Epstein in 1992 soon after she graduated from college, when he offered her a Victoria's Secret modelling job. Such offers were often made by Epstein and his accomplices when recruiting women into his operation and it is unclear if Walker ever actually worked as a model for the Leslie Wexner-owned company. She then stayed at a New York apartment building associated with Epstein's trafficking operations during visits to New York, but it is unclear how long she stayed there or at other Epstein-owned properties. After she graduated from medical school in 1998, she became Epstein's science adviser for at least a year. By 1999, she had grown so close to Prince Andrew that she attended a Windsor Castle birthday celebration hosted by the Queen along with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. During this period, Melanie appears on Epstein's flight logs under her birth name , Melanie Starnes , though it looks like "Starves" on the flight logs.

The close relationship between Prince Andrew and Melanie Walker came under scrutiny after Epstein's former housekeeper at the Zorro Ranch property, Deidre Stratton, stated in an interview that Prince Andrew had been "given" a "beautiful young neurosurgeon" while he stayed at Epstein's New Mexico property. Given that only one neurosurgeon was both close to Prince Andrew and a part of Epstein's entourage at the time, it seems highly likely that this woman "gifted" to Andrew was Melanie Walker. According to Stratton, Andrew "kept company" with this woman for three days. The arrangement was set up by Epstein, who was not at the property at the time. The exact timing of the stay is uncertain, but it likely took place between 1999 and 2001.

Stratton said the following about the stay:

"At the time, Jeffrey had this, she supposedly was a neurosurgeon, quite young, beautiful, young and brilliant, and she stayed in the home with him At one point we had all these different teas and you could pick the teas that you wanted and she asked me to find one that would make Andrew more horny.

I'm guessing she understood her job was to entertain him because I guess, the fear, I don't know; the fear would be that Andrew would say, "No I didn't really find her that attractive." . . . He would tell Jeffrey that and then she would be on the ropes.

I'm guessing that, another theory is, that Jeffrey probably had her on retainer and she knew what her job would be, should be, to make these people happy. . . . Sex was all they thought about. I mean, I know for sure that Jeffrey would ideally like three massages a day."

Sometime later, Walker moved to Seattle and began living with then Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky, who now serves as a board partner at the venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz. Andreesen Horowitz notably backs Carbyne911, the Israel intelligence-linked precrime start-up funded by Epstein and his close associate, former prime minister of Israel Ehud Barak, as well as another Israeli intelligence-linked tech company led by Barak, called Toka . Toka recently won contracts with the governments of Moldova, Nigeria, and Ghana through the World Bank, where Melanie Walker is currently a director and a former special adviser to its president. It is unclear when, how and under what circumstances Walker met Sinofsky.

After moving to Seattle to be with Sinofsky and after a brief stint as a "practitioner in the developing world" in China with the World Health Organization, Walker was hired as a senior program officer by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2006. Given that the main feature of Walker's resume at the time was having been a science adviser to another wealthy "philanthropist," Jeffrey Epstein, her hire by the Gates Foundation for this critical role further underscores how Bill Gates, at the very least, not only knew who Epstein was but knew enough about his scientific interests and investments to want to hire Walker. Walker went on to become deputy director for Global Development as well as a deputy director of Special Initiatives at the foundation. According to the Rockefeller Foundation , where she is a fellow, Walker later advised Gates on issues pertaining to neurotechnology and brain science for Gates's secretive company bgC3 , which Gates originally registered as a think tank under the name Carillon Holdings. According to federal filings, bgC3's focus areas were "scientific and technological services," "industrial analysis and research," and "design and development of computer hardware and software."

During her time at the Gates Foundation, Walker introduced Boris Nikolic, Gates's science adviser, to Epstein. Today, Melanie Walker is the cochair of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Neurotechnology and Brain Science, having previously been named a WEF Young Global Leader. She also advises the World Health Organization, which is closely linked to Bill Gates's "philanthropy."

At the WEF, Walker wrote an article in 2016 entitled " Healthcare in 2030: Goodbye Hospital, Hello Home-spital ," in which she discusses how wearable devices, brain-machine interfaces, and injectable/swallowable robotic "medicines" will be the norm by 2030. Years before COVID-19 and the Great Reset–inspired efforts to change health care in just this way, Walker wrote that while the dystopian scenario she was painting "sounds crazy . . . most of these technologies are either almost ready for prime time, or in development." Of course, a lot of those technologies took shape thanks to the patronage of her former bosses, Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates.

In the case of Boris Nikolic, after being introduced to Epstein through Walker, he attended a 2011 meeting with Gates and Epstein where he was photographed alongside James Staley, then a senior JP Morgan executive, and Larry Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury and a close Epstein associate. Nikolic was chief adviser for science and technology to Bill Gates at the time, advising both the Gates Foundation and bgC3. According to the mainstream narrative, this is supposed to be the first time that Gates and Epstein had ever met. In addition, this may have been when Epstein pitched the joint Gates Foundation–JP Morgan "global health charitable fund."

The 2011 meeting at Jeffrey Epstein's Manhattan mansion attended by James E. Staley, Larry Summers, Jeffery Epstein, Bill Gates and Boris Nikolic

In 2014, Nikolic " waxed enthusiastic " about Epstein's supposed penchant for financial advice ahead of a public offering for a gene-editing company that Nikolic had a $42 million stake in . Notably, both Nikolic and Epstein were clients of the same group of bankers at JP Morgan, with Bloomberg later reporting that Epstein regularly helped those bankers attract wealthy new clients.

In 2016, Nikolic cofounded Biomatics capital, which invests in health-related companies at "the convergence of genomics and digital data" that are "enabling the development of superior therapeutics, diagnostics and delivery models." Nikolic founded Biomatics with Julie Sunderland, formerly the director of the Gates Foundation's Strategic Investment Fund.

At least three of the companies backed by Biomatics -- Qihan Biotech , eGenesis , and Editas -- were cofounded by George Church, a Harvard geneticist with deep ties to Epstein and also closely associated with the Edge Foundation. Biomatics investment in Qihan Biotech is no longer listed on the Biomatics website. Church's Qihan Biotech seeks to produce human tissues and organs inside pigs for transplantation into humans, while eGenesis seeks to genetically modify pig organs for use in humans. Editas produces CRISPR gene-editing "medicines" and is also backed by the Gates Foundation as well as Google Ventures.

Church has been accused of promoting eugenics as well as unethical human experimentation . Epstein's significant interest in eugenics was made public after his death, and Bill Gates, as well as his father William H. Gates II, have also been linked to eugenics movements and ideas.

After Epstein's death in 2019, it was revealed that Nikolic had been named the "successor executor" of Epstein's estate, further suggesting close ties to Epstein despite Nikolic's claims to the contrary. After details of Epstein's will were made public, Nikolic did not sign a form indicating his willingness to be executor and did not ultimately serve in that role.

The Epstein Cover-Up Continues

Despite the relatively abrupt shift in the mainstream media regarding what is acceptable to discuss regarding the Jeffrey Epstein–Bill Gates relationship, many of these same media outlets refuse to acknowledge much of the information contained in this investigative report. This is particularly true in the case of the Evening Standard article and Bill Gates's odd relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell's sister Isabel and CommTouch, the company Isabel previously led.

The likely reason for the continued cover-up of the true extent of Epstein's ties to Gates has much more to do with Gates's company Microsoft than with Bill Gates himself. While it is now permissible to report on ties that discredit Gates's personal reputation, the information that could tie his relationship with Epstein and the Maxwells to Microsoft has been omitted.

If, as the Evening Standard reported, Epstein did make millions out of his business ties with Gates prior to 2001 and if Gates's ties to Isabel Maxwell and the Israeli espionage–linked company CommTouch were to become public knowledge, the result could easily be a scandal on a par with the PROMIS software affair. Such a disclosure could be very damaging for Microsoft and its partner the World Economic Forum , as Microsoft has become a key player in the WEF's Fourth Industrial Revolution initiatives that range from digital identity and vaccine passports to efforts to replace human workers with artificial intelligence.

There are clearly powerful actors with a vested interest in keeping the Epstein-Gates narrative squarely focused on 2011 and later -- not necessarily to protect Gates but more likely to protect the company itself and other top Microsoft executives who appear to have been compromised by Epstein and others in the same intelligence-linked network.

This is hardly an isolated incident, as similar efforts have been made to cover up (or memory hole) the ties of Epstein and the Maxwells to other prominent Silicon Valley empires, such as those led by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk . One key reason for this is that the Epstein network's blackmail operation involved not only sexual blackmail but electronic forms of blackmail , something used to great effect by Robert Maxwell on behalf of Israeli intelligence as part of the PROMIS operation. Given its nature, electronic forms of blackmail through illegal surveillance or backdoored software can be used to compromise those in power with something to hide, but who were uninclined to engage in the exploitation of minors, such as those abused by Epstein.

That Isabel and Christine Maxwell were able to forge close business ties with Microsoft after having been part of the front company that played a central role in PROMIS-related espionage and after explicitly managing their subsequent companies with the admitted intention to "rebuild" their spy father's work and legacy, strongly points to the probability of at least some Microsoft products having been compromised in some fashion, likely through alliances with Maxwell-run tech companies. The lack of mainstream media concern over the documented ties of the Epstein network to other top Microsoft executives of the past, such as Nathan Myhrvold, Linda Stone, and Steven Sinofsky, makes it clear that, while it may be open season on the relationship between Bill Gates and Epstein, such is not the case for Microsoft and Epstein.

The ties of Epstein and the Maxwells to Silicon Valley, not just to Microsoft, are part of a broader attempt to cover up the strong intelligence component in the origin of Silicon Valley's most powerful companies. Much effort has been invested in creating a public perception that these companies are strictly private entities despite their deep, long-standing ties to the intelligence agencies and militaries of the United States and Israel . The true breadth of the Epstein scandal will never be covered by mainstream media because so many news outlets are owned by these same Silicon Valley oligarchs or depend on Silicon Valley for online reader engagement.

Perhaps the biggest reason why the military/intelligence origins and links to the current Silicon Valley oligarchy will never be honestly examined, however, is that those very entities are now working with breakneck speed to usher in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which would make artificial intelligence, automation, mass electronic surveillance, and transhumanism central to human society. One of the architects of this "revolution," Klaus Schwab, said earlier this year that rebuilding and maintaining trust with the public was critical to that project. However, were the true nature of Silicon Valley, including its significant ties to serial child rapist and sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein and his network, to emerge, the public's trust would be significantly eroded, thus threatening what the global oligarchy views as a project critical to its survival .

kapoore , says: June 6, 2021 at 2:48 am GMT • 1.3 hours ago

I'm always impressed with the vigorous detail and documentation in your articles. What a menace these philanthropic organizations are to the ordinary and lowly. These billionaire creeps never stop plotting and figuring out even more ways to stomp on people and push their creepy agendas, which remain forever hidden.

[May 28, 2021] Nuances of the right to vote and Liz Cheney

Both Liz Cheney and Mitt The Bitch Romney are examples of the filthy neocons...
Notable quotes:
"... [in case of Cheney] The war monger doesn't fall far from the tree. ..."
"... Amazing how the liberal news outlets are now supporting a Cheney. But they know more war equals more rating ..."
May 09, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Mike Rotsch 10 minutes ago

. . . which has caused some GOP leaders to fear alienating female Republican voters, particularly educated suburbanites who will be key votes in the 2022 elections.

When I first met my wife, she told me women shouldn't have the right to vote. It was instant love.

A Girl In Flyover Country 59 minutes ago

[in case of Cheney] The war monger doesn't fall far from the tree.

Rise21 42 minutes ago remove link

Amazing how the liberal news outlets are now supporting a Cheney. But they know more war equals more rating

yochananmichael 51 seconds ago

its time for the republicans to rid itself of chicken hawk warmongers like Cheney.

He father disbanded there Iraqi Army which was supposed to provide security, causing an insurgency and 5000 dead American boys and countless maimed.

vic and blood PREMIUM 4 minutes ago

Cheney's benefactors have erected massive billboards all over the state, 'thanking her for defending the Constitution.'

She has an incredible war chest, and sadly, money and advertising decides a lot of elections.

[May 24, 2021] French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian warned on Sunday of the risk of "long-lasting apartheid" in Israel

May 24, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Մասիս , May 24 2021 6:59 utc | 124

The Roots of Coincidence

France is was denying any discomfort with Zionism for 52 years. but since yesterday effect of Plate tectonics are perceptible.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian warned on Sunday of the risk of "long-lasting apartheid" in Israel. The veteran politician [and high rank French official for 40 years with solid connection to French weapons trade] made the remarks in an interview with LCI TV NewsChannel, RTL radio and Le Figaro newspaper [ three major MSM]

https://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/jean-yves-le-drian-met-en-garde-israel-contre-un-risque-d-apartheid-envers-ses-populations-arabes-20210523


from Guardian.ng


French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian warned on Sunday of the risk of "long-lasting apartheid" in Israel in the event the Palestinians fail to obtain their own state.
Le Drian is one of the first senior French officials to use the term "apartheid" in reference to Israel , which has angrily denied any policy of racial discrimination.
The veteran politician made the remarks in an interview with RTL radio and Le Figaro newspaper in reference to the clashes between Jews and Arabs that erupted in several Israeli cities during the latest conflict.
The violence, which revealed simmering anger among Israeli Arabs over the crackdown on Palestinians in Jerusalem, shattered years of peaceful coexistence within Israel.
"It's the first time and it clearly shows that if in the future we had a solution other than the two-state solution, we would have the ingredients of long-lasting apartheid," Le Drian said, using the word for the white supremacist oppression of blacks in South Africa from 1948 to 1991.
Le Drian said the "risk of apartheid is high" if Israel continued to act "according to a single-state logic" but also if it maintained the status quo.
"Even the status quo produces that," he said.
He added that the 11-day conflict between Hamas and Israel had shown the need to revive the moribund Middle East peace process.
https://guardian.ng/news/france-sees-risk-of-apartheid-in-israel-paris-france/
"We have take one step at a time," he said, expressing satisfaction that US President Joe Biden had reiterated support for creating a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Israel's latest offensive against Hamas killed 248 people in the Gaza Strip, including 66 children, and wounded over 1,900, the Hamas-run health ministry said.
Meanwhile, rockets fired by Palestinian armed groups into Israel killed 12 and wounded around 357 others, Israeli police said.

Long-lasting apartheid usually ends badly

--//--

@ James & al.
Please, enjoy a little more Roots of Coincidence


Grieved , May 24 2021 7:05 utc | 125

@120 m - "Iron Dome system according to Israeli sources..."

The point is not the numbers taken from the sales brochure of the system. The point is, what does the penetration of the fantasy shield do to the Israeli psyche?

Israel initiated the ceasefire, without conditions. After 11 days, it could take no more.

Israel has failed to protect itself from the indigenous population that it was oppressing. Palestine has won a victory that changes the game and changes the world.

The entire regional Resistance now knows that Palestine alone can hold the enemy in check. And all the Palestinians everywhere are completely united with only the Resistance as their leader.

Over at the Saker just now, a speech from Hezbollah acknowledges proudly that Palestine itself is now the leading edge of the struggle to remove Israel from the Middle East, and that Hezbollah yearns for the day when it joins side by side with the Palestinians to drive the oppressor from the land.

Palestine as it says could keep up this barrage against Israel for six months - just Palestine alone. And the damage from such a thing would not be measured in how few or how many individual persons were killed by those rockets. The damage would be measured by the scream of madness and defeat from the Zionist oppressor, thrown down by the indigenous populace and cast out of the land in abject fear.

Paul , May 24 2021 8:02 utc | 126
As barflies can see, There may be an undefined 'ceasefire' but the 100 year old ethnic cleansing project in the rest of Palestine continues:

Israel's Daily Toll on Palestinian Life, Limb, Liberty and Land

(Compiled by Leslie Bravery, Palestine Human Rights Campaign, Auckland, New Zealand)
18 May 2021 {Main source of statistics: Palestinian Monitoring Group (PMG): http://www.nad.ps/ NB:The period covered by this newsletter is taken from the PMG's 24-hour sitrep ending 8am the day after the above date.}
We shall always do our best to verify the accuracy of all items in these IOP newsletters/reports wherever possible [e.g. we often suspect that names of people and places that we see in the PMG sitreps could be typos; also frequently the translation into English seems rather odd ~ but as we do not speak Arabic, we have no alternative but to copy and paste these names from the PMG sitreps!] – please forgive us for any errors or omissions – Leslie and Marian.
206 projectiles
launched from Gaza

82 air strikes (157)

Very many
Israeli attacks

158 Israeli
ceasefire violations

21 raids including
home invasions

11 killed – 261 injured

Economic sabotage

43 taken prisoner

Night peace disruption
and/or home invasions
in 6 towns and villages
Home invasions: 09:20, Nazlet al-Sheikh Zaid - 09:20, al-Arqa - 04:00, Anabta - 03:30, Madama - 03:30, Tel.
Peace disruption raids: 14:40, Beitunya - 16:05, Um Safa village - 03:20, Bir Zeit - dawn, Bil'in - 17:40, Tura village - 18:55, Ya'bad - 19:45, Zububa - 06:30, Tubas - 18:05, Quffin - 04:00, Tulkarem - 20:00, Aqraba - 13:45, al-Azza UN refugee camp - 13:45, Aida UN refugee camp - 18:10, al-Khadr - 18:10, Janata - 20:15, Tuqu - 03:00, al-Ubeidiya - dawn, Husan - dawn, al-Ubeidiya.
Ceasefire violations – Palestinian missile attacks: Gaza enclave: From 07:00 until 07:00 the following day 206 projectiles were launched towards the Green Line from Northern Gaza, Gaza City, Central Gaza and Khan Yunis.
Ceasefire violations – Palestinian missile attacks: Gaza enclave: From 07:00 until 07:00 the following day, 206 projectiles were launched towards the Green Line from Northern Gaza, Gaza City, Central Gaza and Khan Yunis.
Ceasefire violations – Palestinian missile attacks: Northern Gaza – 53 projectiles launched towards the Green Line.
Ceasefire violations – Palestinian missile attacks: Gaza – 81 projectiles launched towards the Green Line.
Ceasefire violations – Palestinian missile attacks: Central Gaza – 17 projectiles launched towards the Green Line.
Ceasefire violations – Palestinian missile attacks: Khan Yunis – 38 projectiles launched towards the Green Line.
Ceasefire violations – Palestinian missile attacks: Khan Yunis – 17 projectiles launched towards the Green Line.
Ceasefire violations – air strikes: Gaza enclave – from 07:00 until 07:00 the following day, Israeli warplanes carried out 82 air strikes, launching 157 missiles onto Gaza. There were 7 killed, 50 injured, 35 homes destroyed and much damage caused.
Ceasefire violations – air strikes: Northern Gaza – Israeli warplanes launched 21 air strikes – 35 missiles: 16 injured and 10 homes destroyed.
Ceasefire violations – air strikes: Gaza – Israeli warplanes launched 17 air strikes – 27 missiles: 6 killed (including a child), 15 injured (including women and children) and 7 homes destroyed.
Ceasefire violations – air strikes: Central Gaza – Israeli warplanes launched 14 air strikes – 20 missiles: 11injured and 6 homes destroyed.
Ceasefire violations – air strikes: Khan Yunis – Israeli warplanes launched 13 air strikes – 46 missiles: 1 killed, 14 injured and 10 homes destroyed.
Ceasefire violations – air strikes: Rafah – Israeli warplanes launched 17 air strikes – 29 missiles. 3 injured and 2 homes destroyed.
Ceasefire violations – Israeli attacks: Gaza enclave: From 07:00 until 07:00 the following day, the Israeli Army and Navy pounded Central Gaza, Khan Yunis and Rafah.
Israeli Army attacks – 18 wounded: Jerusalem – Israeli Occupation forces opened fire, with live ammunition, rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters on protesters in Shuafat, al-Zaim, al-Jib, Beit Ijza, Qalandiya, near the villages of Qatanna and al-Issawiya, as well as in Abu Dis, al-Eizariya and at the entrances to Hizma, al-Sawahrah al-Sharqiya, Anata, the al-Ram road junction, Bab al-Amoud area and al-Wad Street in Jerusalem Old City. 18 protesters were wounded.
Israeli Army attack: Jerusalem – 18:00, Israeli Occupation forces opened fire on Palestinian motor vehicles in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood.
Israeli Army attacks – 3 killed – 72 wounded: Ramallah – Israeli forces in or near al-Bireh, Sinjil, Aboud, Ni'lin, al-Mughayer, Deir Jarir, Kafr Malik, Nabi Salih, Ein Qiniya, Ras Karkar, Kharbatha Bani Harith, Beit Sira, al-Jalazoun refugee camp, fired live ammunition, rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters, killing 3 people, Muhammad Mahmoud Hamid (24), Adham Fayez Al-Kashef (20) and Islam Wael Fahmy Barnat, and wounding 72. There were many tear gas casualties.
Israeli Army attacks – 4 wounded: Jenin – Israeli troops, manning the Jalamah and Dotan checkpoints and at the southern entrance to Silat al-Dahr, fired live ammunition, rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters, wounding 4 people and causing several tear gas casualties.
Israeli Army attacks – 7 wounded: Tulkarem – Israeli forces, manning the Einav checkpoint and troops in Tulkarem, Quffin, Zit and at the entrance to Beit Lid, fired live ammunition, rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters, wounding 7 and causing several tear gas casualties.
Israeli Army attacks – 8 wounded: Qalqiliya – Israeli Occupation forces, at the entrances to Azun, Hajjah, and Kafr Qaddum as well as near Jayus, Hablat and at the Eyal crossing, fired live ammunition, rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters, wounding 8 people and causing several tear gas casualties.
Israeli Army attacks – 33 wounded: Nablus – Israeli Army positions, near the Huwara checkpoint, the intersection of Osirin and Sarra villages and near the entrances to Qusra, Beta, Jama'in, Naqoura, Deir Sharaf, Burin, Madama, Asirah al-Qibliya, Yutma, al-Labban al-Sharqiya, Odla, al-Sawiyah and the village of Tal, fired live ammunition, rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters, wounding 33 people and causing several tear gas casualties.
Israeli Army attacks: Salfit – Israeli troops, near the entrances to Deir Istiya, Qarawat Bani Hassan, al-Zawiya and the northern entrance to Salfit, fired live ammunition, rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters. There were several tear gas casualties.
Israeli Army attacks – 18 wounded: Bethlehem – Israeli forces, present at Bilal Bin Rabah Mosque, the Aida refugee camp, northern entrance to Tuqu', western entrance to Beit Fajar, Um Rakba area of al-Khadr and entrance to Husan, fired live ammunition, rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters, wounding 18 people and causing several tear gas casualties.
Israeli Army attacks – 1 killed: Hebron – morning, Israeli Occupation forces, positioned in the Old City, opened fire on and killed a resident: Islam Fayyad Zahida (32).
Israeli Army attacks – 30 wounded: Hebron – the Israeli Army, positioned in the Bab al-Zawiya area of Hebron and in the Old City, as well as near the entrances to Beit Ummar, Bani Naim, Tarqumiya, Khurasa village, the al-Aroub refugee camp and on Halhul Bridge, fired live ammunition, rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters, wounding 30 people and causing several tear gas casualties.
Economic sabotage: Gaza -- the Israeli Navy continues to enforce an arbitrary fishing limit.
Home invasion: Jenin – 09:20, Israeli Occupation forces raided the villages of Nazlet al-Sheikh Zaid and al-Arqa, and invaded a house.
Home invasion – boy (aged 15) abducted : Tulkarem – 04:00, Israeli troops raided Anabta and abducted 15-year-old Muhammad Salam Wajih Rasheed.
Home invasions: Nablus – 03:30, Israeli forces raided Madama and Tel villages and invaded a number of homes.
Israeli police and settlers' mosque violation: 23:00, Israeli Occupation police invaded the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque, filming the Mosque and its facilities.
Israeli Army – 7 wounded – rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters: Tubas – Israeli Occupation forces, manning the Tayasir checkpoint and in the village of Atouf, fired rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters, wounding 7 people and causing several tear gas casualties.
Israeli Army – 5 wounded – rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters: Jericho – Israeli forces, at the northern and southern entrances to Jericho, as well as outside the Aqbat Jaber refugee camp, fired rubber-coated bullets, stun grenades and tear gas canisters towards protesters, wounding 5 people and causing several tear gas casualties.
Occupation settler violence: Jerusalem – 18:00, Israeli settlers stoned a family home, on the outskirts of the village of Beit Ijza.
Occupation road casualties: Bethlehem – 16:40, an Israeli settler drove his motor vehicle over and hospitalised a 19-year-old Abdullah Saqr Saad, near Khalet Iskarya.
Raid: Ramallah – 14:40, Israeli Occupation forces raided and patrolled Beitunya.
Raid: Ramallah – 16:05, Israeli forces raided and patrolled Um Safa village.
Raid – 1 taken prisoner: Ramallah – 03:20, Israeli troops raided Bir Zeit, taking prisoner one person.
Raid – 1 taken prisoner: Ramallah – dawn, the Israeli Army raided Bil'in village, taking prisoner one person.
Raid: Jenin – 17:40, Israeli troops raided and patrolled Tura village.
Raid: Jenin – 18:55, Israeli soldiers raided and patrolled Ya'bad.
Raid: Jenin – 19:45, Israeli Occupation forces raided and patrolled Zububa village.
Raid: Tubas – 06:30, Israeli forces raided and patrolled Tubas.
Raid: Tulkarem – 18:05, the Israeli Army raided and patrolled Quffin.
Raid: Tulkarem – 04:0 Israeli troops raided Tulkarem.
Raid: Nablus – 20:00, Israeli soldiers raided and patrolled Aqraba.
Raid – UN refugee camps: Bethlehem – 13:45, Israeli Occupation forces raided and patrolled the al-Azza and Aida UN refugee camps in Bethlehem.
Raid: Bethlehem – 18:10, Israeli forces raided and patrolled al-Khadr and Janata.
Raid – 2 abductions: Bethlehem – 20:15, Israeli troops raided Tuqu and abducted two 16-year-old youths: Muhammad Khaled Nasrallah and Sind Talal Al-Amor.
Raid: Bethlehem – 03:00, Israeli soldiers raided and patrolled al-Ubeidiya.
Raid – 2 taken prisoner: Bethlehem – dawn, the Israeli Army raided Husan village, taking prisoner two people.
Raid – 2 taken prisoner: Bethlehem – dawn, Israeli Occupation forces raided al-Ubeidiya, taking prisoner twopeople.
Restrictions of movement (14): 11:30, entrance to Turmusaya- 11:20, tightened procedures at Huwara - 12:00, tightened procedures at Kifl Haris - 12:50, entrance to al-Zawiya - 11:25-12:30, al-Nashash road junction - 14:10, entrance to al-Walaja village - midnight, entrance to Marah Mualla - 09:15, entrance to the Fahs area, south of Hebron - 18:45, entrance to Sa'ir - Beit Hanoun (Erez) crossing closed - al-Mantar-Karni crossing closed - al-Shujaiyeh crossing (Nahal Oz) closed - Sufa crossing closed - al-Awda Port closed.
[NB: Times indicated in Bold Type contribute to the sleep deprivation suffered by Palestinian children]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If any of our subscribers should like to reproduce complete, in full and unedited, these In Occupied Palestine daily newsletters that would be very welcome!
If you no longer wish to receive these emails, please let us know and if you have friends or family who would like to receive them ask them to contact us at [email protected]
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Մասիս , May 24 2021 11:11 utc | 137

@ Paul, "100 year old ethnic cleansing project in the rest of Palestine continues", but
Tectonic plates still moving, collapse of an edifice of complacency

David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).
Published a shaking OP ED

Losing the war: The rising cost of Israel's lapsed support for 2-state solution

Must read

"It doesn't matter that Hamas is a repressive, misogynistic, homophobic, Islamist terrorist organization that fires thousands of rockets indiscriminately at innocent civilians all over the State of Israel...
[...]
It doesn't matter...
[...]
Again, it doesn't matter, because we are no longer avowedly seeking, even in principle, a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- the currently and foreseeably insoluble Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And since we no longer avowedly aspire to be part of the solution, we are increasingly perceived as part of the problem, as rejectionists.
[...]
Israel still has plenty of friends, and plenty of support, including crucially in the US. Three EU foreign ministers chose to make a solidarity visit to bombed Israeli homes at the height of the conflict. But the ground is shifting dangerously.
Many of us, this writer emphatically included, regard a two-state solution as essential if we are not to lose either our Jewish majority, or our democracy, or both, forever entangled among millions of hostile Palestinians. Many of us, this writer emphatically included, cannot currently see a safe route to such an accommodation.

For the last time, it doesn't matter. So long as Israel does not place itself firmly and distinctly on the side of those seeking a viable framework for long-term peace and security for ourselves and for the Palestinians, we will be regarded as blocking that framework. And even when facing an enemy so patently cynical, amoral and intransigent as Hamas, militarily strong Israel will be held responsible for the loss of life on both sides of the conflict.
We may keep on winning the battles, though they will get harder if fighting spreads to and deepens on other fronts. But we will be gradually losing the war.

[May 16, 2021] The Politics of Cultural Despair- A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (California Library Reprint Series)- Stern, Fr

May 16, 2021 | www.amazon.com

4.0 out of 5 stars The roots of National Socialism in cultural criticism Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2019 Verified Purchase Written originally in 1961 as part of venerable scholar Fritz Stern's doctoral thesis The Politics of Cultural Despair is a classic study of the cultural criticism and irrational ideologies of three 19th and early 20th century German writers that helped pave the way for the rise of the Third Reich and the triumph of national socialism. The book traces the lives and works of the obscure German writers and scholars Lagarde, Langbehn, and Moeller to illuminate how ideas conducive to national socialism, including antisemitism, extreme German nationalism (volk movement), anti-liberalism, anti-intellectualism, the desire for an authoritarian Caesar or "Fuhrer", and the primacy of "the will", became pervasive in 19th and early 20th century Germany.

All three authors relentlessly attacked liberal democracy, the enlightenment tradition, and the modern industrial society that had separated the German people from their "spiritual" and "pure" connection with the Germany's ancestral forests and countryside. They were, as Stern puts it, "Conservatives with nothing left to conserve". They viewed Germany's unification and the advancement of liberal democracy and modernity as a disastrous development that divided Germany's people and drained them of their spiritual essence. Their criticism also took on extreme antisemitism that egregiously blamed the Jewish people and portrayed them as conspiratorial outsiders who promoted capitalism and diluted Germany's ethnic purity. They also felt that traditional sources of authority, such as religion and the Bismarck nation state, were entirely inadequate and stale in the age of Nietzsche. Seeing Germany in crisis, and with no traditional political or cultural forces to turn to, all three authors became their own prophets of change. They expounded vague and irrational theories that found salvation in nationalists myths and desired a return to a illusory past where the German people lived in unified harmony and prosperity in their ancestral lands. The authors took on the delusional path from cultural critics to Nihilistic prophets. Starting from somewhat credible attacks on Germany's political and cultural shortcomings and transforming them into irrational and delusional political programs with little grasp on reality and dangerous support for authoritarian policies. Tragically, their works enjoyed a consistent level of support among Germany's population and influenced many philosophers and political theorists, such as Alfred Rosenberg, that would formulate the National Socialist ideology. While none of the three were Nazis, all of them clearly proliferated ideas central to the National Socialist program and advocated for a dangerous and authoritarian cultural regeneration.

Stern's work is classic in the sense that it represents the mid 20th century political and historical scholarly work that focuses on the impact of political ideologies and political ideas. While this focus on "ideas" is far less emphasized today in modern political science scholarship, the book reminds us that the rise of National Socialism and Fascism was far more than a reaction to Germany's disastrous defeat in World War I and the impact of the Versailles Treaty. Instead, the ideas of national socialism were deeply embedded in German society and represented a dangerous undercurrent acting against the forces of democratic liberalism, industrialization, and the enlightenment. In advocating a "politics of cultural despair" all three turned towards delusional, dangerous, and authoritarian solutions that could have only supported a political program as appalling and devastating as national socialism. As Stern reminds us, "the politics of cultural despair" can come from any region of the political spectrum where the most unwavering cultural critics can become "nihilistic" prophets who desire not just cultural change, but cultural and political regeneration based on a mythic and nonexistent past or promise a millenarian utopia . A statement that applies not only to Germany's lost 19th and 20th century conservatives, but to idealistic leftist terrorist groups in the 60s and 70s, and Islamic and right wing terrorist groups today. In summary, Stern reminds us not only that Fascism and National Socialism had deep roots in 19th and 20th century Germany, but also of the dangers of irrational and delusional political programs that depart from reality.

However, like any good skeptic, one has to wonder how important the cultural and political critiques and ideas of Stern's three authors really were. Modern political science has mostly moved beyond the focus on political ideas found in Stern's work and without concrete quantitative data, it is close to impossible to determine the impact of their work. The book also suffers from a narrow focus that makes it less approachable for the casual reader. Unlike other introductory works on Fascism and National Socialism, Stern writes for an expert audience that is expected to be well versed in 19th and 20th century German political, philosophical, and intellectual history. Readers less versed in these subjects may find the book less enjoyable and insightful. Although this work has probably been superseded by more modern works, it remains a classic in the field of intellectual and political history and represents classic political and cultural history at its best. I also recommend George Mosse's 1964 work "The Crisis of the German Ideology" that covers very similar ground, as well as Zeev Sternhell's "The Birth of Fascist Ideology" on the intellectual origins of Italian Fascism. >

DTC#

A presage of the rise of German National Socialism. Similarities to modern Islamic Radicalism.

4.0 out of 5 stars A presage of the rise of German National Socialism. Similarities to modern Islamic Radicalism. Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2006 Verified Purchase Stern's book gives us valuable insight into currents of German thinking from the 19th century up to the rise of National Socialism in the 20s and 30s. Stern's books focuses on the writings of Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, and Moeller van den Bruck.

Paul de Lagarde was a biblical scholar and a master of oriental languages like Aramaic and Persian. He was also a rabid Jew hater who openly called for extermination. He loathed classical Western liberalism, science, and capitalism. For him, these were all spiritless abstractions. For Lagarde, Western liberalism, capitalism, science, and the Jews where the monstrous embodiment of all he hated. He had a romantic notion of a mythical Germanic past, and he believed the Jews and the modern society of the West were conspiring to pollute and corrupt this pure German spirit. He advocated a Great Leader, a "purge the Jew" program, and a divinely inspired expansionist foreign policy to rekindle an authentic and noble Germanic way of life.

Lagarde despised bourgeois 19th century German Christianity, and he called for a "new" German religion that would purge all the Jewish elements of Christianity and become the unifying spiritual basis and justification for the new German state. This new religion would fuse the squabbling German factions and sects into a unified people and nation with one single will .... embodied in the form a "Great Leader."

Lagarde rejected the premise of general education, and instead, he proposed a totally new education system based on social status and intellectual promise. This new, state-run authoritarian education system would mold the leaders of the new German nation.

Julius Langbehn wrote a book that extolled the Dutch artist Rembrandt as an authentic "German man". If this sounds confusing, well ... it is ..., but recall that many years later the Nazis attempted to use Rembrandt as a cultural symbol to force a Dutch-German alliance after they occupied Holland during the war.

Like Lagarde, Langbehn hated the modern liberal society because of its mechanization, realism, bourgeois lifestyle, and commercialism. Like Hitler, Langbehn was an "artist"; he was anti-scientific, anti-Western, and anti-rational. He postulated a "cult of the young" (think Hitler Youth) and a "Hidden Emperor" (think Führer) who would emerge to unite the German people. Again like Lagarde, Langbehn hated the U.S.A because it was the embodiment of all he despised. He warned that Jews were destroying the German "Volk" by "worming" their way into German life. For Langbehn, modernity itself was the ultimate cause of German decay, and the Jews were to blame for bringing this modernity to German society. For Langbehn, the Jews were "democratically inclined; they have an affinity for the mob," and like Lagarde, Langbehn called for extermination of the Jews.

I won't go on about Moeller van den Bruck, because it is similar to Lagarde and Langbehn. One important footnote: The Nazi's got the term "The Third Reich" from one of Moeller's books.

In summary, we find a set of three German intellectual romantics who were alienated by modernism and who abhorred all that was new. They suffered from "cultural despair." For these three, the "Jews" were the immediate agents of corrupting change, and it was America that was the colossal embodiment of all they detested. For them, a pure and authentic German way of life was lost due to the conspiracy and confluence of these horrible forces of modernism. All of the ills and fractiousness and faithlessness of German society were attributable to Jews and liberal modernism (as exemplified by America).

These three sought to annihilate the bourgeois modern society they found themselves in and they sought to replace it with a utopian dream. Their utopia was a unified and harmonious German people -- purged of Jews -- who would be orderly, hierarchical, and authentic. This unified German nation would be led by a strong emperor who would perfectly embody the unified will of the people. They sought a "New German religion", free of Jewish influence, that would provide a unifying framework for this new society. They proposed state-controlled education and propaganda, leadership by a small elite, annexation and conquest of middle Europe, and they called for the extermination of Jews.

In short - these three "culturally despairing" egg heads predicted much of the horror of the Nazis. All three were widely read in German society at various points in time leading up to the rise of National Socialism.

We know that Hitler emphatically read Lagarde. For more on this, see "Hitler's Forgotten Library" in the May 2003 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, by Timothy W. Ryback. On p.295, Stern shows how Lagarde, Langbehn, and van den Bruck influenced other key Nazi ideologists like Alfred Rosenberg.

The book contains extensive footnotes and end notes, a large bibliography, and a good index. I have one gripe with the book. There are several book titles, quotes, and passages that are in German without English translation. I could not work them out with my meager German. I wish translations were provided. I also wish pictures or portraits of Lagarde, Langbehn, and van den Bruck were provided.

Finally, I'd like to add that many of the themes we see having emerged from Lagarde, Langbehn, and van den Bruck are similar to what is found the more recent work of the influential Islamic radical Sayyid Qutb. I strongly recommend the Paul Berman book "Terror and Liberalism" for a very readable and enlightening treatment of Qutb.

[May 12, 2021] It is the corporations that work in the background that seem to be the real seat of power

May 12, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Stonebird , May 12 2021 20:56 utc | 47

psychohistorian | May 12 2021 19:44 utc | 31

I'm not sure that it is global private finance that is the key. Although I used to.

Either we consider the Oligarchs (Bezos Zuckerberg) as the newest form of low life, or the Banking cartels and billionares are even lower.

BUT - There is a third class of Global financiers. That is "Corporations" (as a class). Corporations are immortal, and like a hydra, with many heads, have more arms than an "image of a covid-virus" ( Octopussii are simply too limited, although they are a good example of multi-brained resourceful animals ). They are also "persons" in front of the law, with all the protections and privilges that offers. On other occasions they are simply above the law (Twit-Facebook and free speech). The people running them are only occasionally reprimanded, but the "corporation" itself is never touched. *1*

They pay, sometimes, a bit of taxes, have different laws and have lobbies working in their favour. Can corrupt Politicians with the offer of directorships or whatever. They can even be "foundations" and pay no tax at all. They deal across many different National laws, obey what they will, and are extra terrritorial in scope. They can have a nominal "center", while decisions are made elsewhere. They are in fact a new type of alien supra-being .
Of course, the "leaders" of Corporations are rich, but they can be replaced by others at the wishes of "shareholders". Untouchable and unknown.

Very useful for storing wealth and speculating at the same time.

In spite of Musk and others taking all the limelight, it is the corporations that work in the background that seem to be the real seat of power.
---
*1* One of the last real actions taken against Corporate power was the breaking up of Rockefellers Standard Oil .

*****

*2* In the case of the "breakup" of either the US or the EU - would the corporations be touched (eliminated), or hailed as saving civilisation?

[May 09, 2021] Wokism and black and white mentality of new cultural revolution

Highly recommended!
This one-to-one replay of Red Guards - Wikipedia but with quite different sponsors ;-) "Hóng Wèibīng was a mass student-led paramilitary social movement mobilized and guided by Chairman Mao Zedong in 1966 through 1967, during the first phase of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
Notable quotes:
"... there is an on-going effort to create fads/movements in which the public becomes caught-up and distracts the from reality. ..."
"... The more binary and controversial the better. Red/Blue. I used to be a big fan of sports but have the opinion it is a pointless waste of time and my life is better for that realization. ..."
"... Characteristics of the Woke: They always attack, especially with insults, like "paranoia nonsense". They never address the actual point made, instead they reinterpret the point to make it appear pure evil. Which allows them to attribute the worst possible motivations on the person they are attacking. Naturally they invent things the other person hadn't even mentioned, like climate change. ..."
"... Again the whole woke 'identity' culture that cancels dissent and promotes 'minorities' in positions of power is simply woke fascism. Just as military recruitment is about turning violent video games real for young men, so too is CIA recruitment about inviting the 'woke' for murder and mayhem in the name 'freedom' without which the woke could not wake. ..."
May 09, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

jared , May 5 2021 16:50 utc | 49

I think that there is an on-going effort to create fads/movements in which the public becomes caught-up and distracts the from reality.

The more binary and controversial the better. Red/Blue. I used to be a big fan of sports but have the opinion it is a pointless waste of time and my life is better for that realization.

Additionally/tangentially, I feel there is a habit in the English language in particular to create new words to describe things these words are not well define and generate a lot of discussion and heat about things that nobody knows what they are actually talking about and end up arguing the meaning of the words.

People who don't know the new words must try to catch up or be left out of the discussion. I don't direct this at your discussion. I just wonder how we might see things if we were constrained to a limited vocabulary - as I am as a programmer of sorts.

EoinW , May 5 2021 16:57 utc | 52

NonPartisanRinsed | May 5 2021 16:03 utc | 30

Characteristics of the Woke: They always attack, especially with insults, like "paranoia nonsense". They never address the actual point made, instead they reinterpret the point to make it appear pure evil. Which allows them to attribute the worst possible motivations on the person they are attacking. Naturally they invent things the other person hadn't even mentioned, like climate change.

gottlieb , May 5 2021 17:06 utc | 54

Again the whole woke 'identity' culture that cancels dissent and promotes 'minorities' in positions of power is simply woke fascism. Just as military recruitment is about turning violent video games real for young men, so too is CIA recruitment about inviting the 'woke' for murder and mayhem in the name 'freedom' without which the woke could not wake.

psychohistorian , May 5 2021 17:17 utc | 55

I will believe that any of this is worth a shit when Snowden wades in with his opinion...until then its just another distraction

The CIA is why we can't have "wokeism" about the right issue like global private/public finance.....where is Occupy 2.0?

The current wokeism is like the pet rocks of old days.....would want folks to focus that woke on the inherited class structure of the private property West, would we?

[May 03, 2021] FISA And The Still Too Secret Police

With PRISM in place FICA court is redundant...
Notable quotes:
"... All an FBI supervisor has to do to get a FISA warrant on you is have one agent get a crooked snitch in a foreign country to send you a weird text message, and then have another bright eyed and bushy tailed agent who doesn't know the crook is a snitch write up a search warrant application affidavit and submit it to the FISA court. ..."
"... Nothing says "Unconstitutional (illegal) Deep State" like FISA. Hitler's Gestapo would be proud! ..."
"... Lisa and Peter removed any credibility the FBI had with the public. If they solved real crime they would go after the massive fraud and stolen ID criminals. Of course that takes real work and someone wanting get off their lazy rear end ..."
May 03, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by James Bovard,

The FBI continues to lawlessly use counterintelligence powers against American citizens...

The Deep State Referee just admitted that the FBI continues to commit uncounted violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA).

If you sought to report a crime to the FBI, an FBI agent may have illegally surveilled your email. Even if you merely volunteered for the FBI "Citizens Academy" program, the FBI may have illegally tracked all your online activity.

But the latest FBI offenses, like almost all prior FBI violations, are not a real problem, according to James Boasberg, presiding judge of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. That court, among other purposes, is supposed to safeguard Americans' constitutional right to privacy under FISA. FISA was originally enacted to create a narrow niche for foreign intelligence investigations that could be conducted without a warrant from a regular federal court. But as time passed, FISA morphed into an uncontrolled yet officially sanctioned privacy-trampling monster. FISA judges unleash the nuclear bomb of searches, authorizing the FBI "to conduct, simultaneous telephone, microphone, cell phone, e-mail and computer surveillance of the U.S. person target's home, workplace and vehicles," as well as "physical searches of the target's residence, office, vehicles, computer, safe deposit box and U.S. mails."

In 2008, after the George W. Bush administration's pervasive illegal warrantless wiretaps were exposed, Congress responded by enacting FISA amendments that formally entitled the National Security Agency to vacuum up mass amounts of emails and other communication, a swath of which is provided to the FBI. In 2018, the FISA court slammed the FBI for abusing that database with warrantless searches that violated Americans' rights. In lieu of obeying FISA, the FBI created a new Office of Internal Audit. Deja vu! Back in 2007, FBI agents were caught massively violating the Patriot Act by using National Security Letters to conduct thousands of illegal searches on Americans' personal data. Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) declared that an Inspector General report on the abusive searches "confirms the American people's worst fears about the Patriot Act." FBI chief Robert Mueller responded by creating a new Office of Integrity and Compliance as "another important step toward ensuring we fulfill our mission with an unswerving commitment to the rule of law." Be still my beating heart!

The FBI's promise to repent after the 2018 report sufficed for the FISA court to permit the FBI to continue plowing through the personal data it received from NSA. Monday's disclosure "a delayed release of a report by the court last November "revealed that the FBI has conducted warrantless searches of the data trove for "domestic terrorism," "public corruption and bribery," "health care fraud," and other targets "including people who notified the FBI of crimes and even repairmen entering FBI offices. As Spencer Ackerman wrote in the Daily Beast , "The FBI continues to perform warrantless searches through the NSA's most sensitive databases for routine criminal investigations." That type of search "potentially jeopardizes an accused person's ability to have a fair trial since warrantlessly acquired information is supposed to be inadmissible. The FBI claimed to the court that none of the warrantlessly queried material "˜was used in a criminal or civil proceeding,' but such usage at trial has happened before," Ackerman noted. Some illicit FBI searches involve vast dragnets. As the New York Times reported , an FBI agent in 2019 conducted a database search "using the identifiers of about 16,000 people, even though only seven of them had connections to an investigation."

In the report released Monday, Judge Boasberg lamented "apparent widespread violations" of the legal restrictions for FBI searches. Regardless, Boasberg kept the illicit search party going: "The Court is willing to again conclude that the . . . [FBI's] procedures meet statutory and Fourth Amendment requirements." "Willing to again conclude" sounds better than "close enough for constitutional."

At this point, Americans know only the abuses that the FBI chose to disclose to FISA judges. We have no idea how many other perhaps worse abuses may have occurred. For a hundred years, the FBI has buttressed its power by keeping a lid on its crimes. Unfortunately, the FISA Court has become nothing but Deep State window dressing "a facade giving the illusion that government is under the law. Consider Boasberg's recent ruling in the most brazen FISA abuse yet exposed. In December 2019, the Justice Department Inspector General reported that the FBI made "fundamental errors " and persistently deceived the FISA court to authorize surveilling a 2016 Trump presidential campaign official. The I.G. report said the FBI "drew almost entirely" from the Steele dossier to prove a "well-developed conspiracy" between Russians and the Trump campaign even though it was "unable to corroborate any of the specific substantive allegations against Carter Page" in that dossier, which was later debunked.

A former FBI assistant general counsel, Kevin Clinesmith, admitted to falsifying key evidence to secure the FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. As a Wall Street Journal editorial noted , Clinesmith "changed an email confirming Mr. Page had been a CIA source to one that said the exact opposite, explicitly adding the words "˜not a source' before he forwarded it." A federal prosecutor declared that the "resulting harm is immeasurable" from Clinesmith's action. But at the sentencing hearing, Boasberg gushed with sympathy, noting that Clinesmith "went from being an obscure government lawyer to standing in the eye of a media hurricane"¦ Mr. Clinesmith has lost his job in government service"what has given his life much of its meaning." Scorning the federal prosecutor's recommendation for jail time, Boasberg gave Clinesmith a wrist slap"400 hours of community service and 12 months of probation.

The FBI FISA frauds profoundly disrupted American politics for years and the din of belatedly debunked accusations of Trump colluding with Russia swayed plenty of votes in the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential election. But for the chief FISA judge, nothing matters except the plight of an FBI employee who lost his job after gross misconduct. This is the stark baseline Americans should remember when politicians, political appointees, and judges promise to protect them from future FBI abuses. The FISA court has been craven, almost beyond ridicule, perennially. Perhaps Boasberg was simply codifying a prerogative the FISA court previously awarded upon FBI officials. In 2005, after a deluge of false FBI claims in FISA warrants, FISA Presiding Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly proposed requiring FBI agents to swear to the accuracy of the information they presented. That never happened because it could have "slowed such investigations drastically," the Washington Post reported . So, FBI agents continue to lie with impunity to the judges.

The FISA court has gone from pretending that FBI violations don't occur to pretending that violations don't matter. Practically the only remaining task is for the FISA court to cease pretending Americans have any constitutional right to privacy . But if a sweeping new domestic terrorism law is passed, perhaps even that formal acknowledgement will be unnecessary. Beginning in 2006, the court rubber-stamped FBI requests that bizarrely claimed that the telephone records of all Americans were "relevant" to a terrorism investigation under the Patriot Act, thereby enabling NSA data seizures later denounced by a federal judge as "almost Orwellian." FISA could become a peril to far more Americans if Congress formally creates a new domestic terrorism offense and a new category for expanding FISA searches.

The backlash from Democrats after the January 6 clash at the Capitol showcased the demand for federal crackdowns on extremists who doubted Biden's election, disparaged federal prerogatives, or otherwise earned congressional ire. If a domestic terrorism law is passed, the FBI will feel as little constrained by the details of the statute as it does about FISA's technicalities. Will FBI agents conducting warrantless searches rely on the same harebrained standard the NSA used to target Americans: "someone searching the web for suspicious stuff"? Unfortunately, unless an FBI whistleblower with the same courage as former NSA analyst Edward Snowden steps forward, we may never know the extent of FBI abuses


ebworthen 39 minutes ago

"You want to harass a political opponent? Sure, we can do that...

JaxPavan 42 minutes ago

All an FBI supervisor has to do to get a FISA warrant on you is have one agent get a crooked snitch in a foreign country to send you a weird text message, and then have another bright eyed and bushy tailed agent who doesn't know the crook is a snitch write up a search warrant application affidavit and submit it to the FISA court.

Joe Bribem 32 minutes ago

It's almost like we did this to Trump. But it'll never come to light. Oops it did. Not that anything will happen to us because we own the corrupt DOJ and FBI.

Obama's own personal private army.

You_Cant_Quit_Me 7 minutes ago

A lot of tips come in from overseas. For example, the US spies on citizens of another country and then sends that country tips, in exchange that country does the same by spying on US citizens and sending the FBI tips. Then it starts, "we are just following up on a tip"

wee-weed up 36 minutes ago (Edited)

Nothing says "Unconstitutional (illegal) Deep State" like FISA. Hitler's Gestapo would be proud!

You_Cant_Quit_Me 37 minutes ago

Lisa and Peter removed any credibility the FBI had with the public. If they solved real crime they would go after the massive fraud and stolen ID criminals. Of course that takes real work and someone wanting get off their lazy rear end

takeaction 58 minutes ago (Edited)

If you own a smart phone...everything you do is recorded...and logged. "They" have been listening to you for a long time if they want to.

If you own any smart device...they can listen and watch. They are monitoring what I am typing and this site. There really is no way to hide.

[May 03, 2021] Why George W. Bush Was a Horrible President

Notable quotes:
"... By Lambert Strether of Corrente. ..."
"... Don't deny W his agency. As I followed the horrors, from Vietnam to Iraq to Syria to Central America and elsewhere, the full list that was visible anyway, of the W regime, it sure seemed clear to me that W played the bumbling yuk very well. ..."
"... the dumb cluck thing was mostly an act. he was deliberately talking that way not only to paint himself as stupid, but also because those in power assume we must be spoken to as children (they've studied president speeches since JFK have decreased from high school level to 6th grade in complexity, word usage etc). ..."
"... In our kayfabe duoparty system, it also gave the "opposing" side the "W is a Chimp" talking point to harp on (dress rehearsal for the same stuff against tRUMP). ..."
"... Abu Ghraib was not an anomaly, Con Son Island served the same purpose during the Vietnam War. When I was young I was proud to be an American Citizen, we had the Bill of Rights, the Military was controlled by Civilians and their oath was to defend the Constitution from "All Enemies Foreign and Domestic.". I have been horrified, ashamed and deeply saddened by what has happened in the US over the last half Century or so. ..."
"... I view the 2008 election as the major failing-to-turn-back-when-we-had-the-chance point. Obama could have undone Bush's worst policies, but instead he cemented them into place forever. ..."
"... Our elites are both stupid and evil, but Bush is more stupid and Obama is more evil ..."
"... you are 40 years off the mark-It was Reagan who's brand of avuncular fascism, celebrating stupidity as a virtue who paved the way. ..."
"... albrt: I agree with your take. Obama campaigned as an anti-war candidate (at least wrt Iraq). He then proceeded to "˜surge' into Afghanistan and added Libya, Syria, and Yemen, to the regime change mix. Never a thought given to prosecuting the war criminals: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Tenet, Feith, Wolfowitz, Powell, et al; much less even consider a truth and reconciliation commission. ..."
"... Obama was equally complicit in this never ending horror show and, I am hopeful, history will hold him equally accountable. ..."
"... Is it not written that Margaret Thatcher's true legacy was Tony Blair? If that is true, then the true legacy of Dubya is Obama. ..."
"... As far as harm that George W. Bush did and launched (illegal/immoral wars, domestic surveillance, tax cuts for the wealthy"¦.) Bush should take the award. ..."
"... When Obama deliberately and with malice aforethought turned all the admitted (and in fact proudly self-avowed) war-criminals and criminals-against humanity loose, free and clear under "look forward not back", he routinised and permanentized the up-to-that-very-minute irregular and extra-constitutional novel methods of governance and practice which the Cheney-Bush Administration had pioneered. Obama deliberately made torture, aggressive war, etc. "legal" when America does it and "permanent" as long as America is strong enough to keep doing it. ..."
"... The Greatest Disappointment in History. No-one else comes close, in terms of the sheer numbers of people globally who he let down. The Bait and Switch King, The Great Betrayer. After the nightmare of Bush we got him and his "˜eloquence', pulling the wool over the dazzled sheeple's eyes while he entrenched the 1% and the neocon MI complex, his paymasters, and sponsors for his entry into the overclass. ..."
"... Lambert, you forgot this one" Biden presents Liberty Medal to George and Laura Bush Instead of a war crimes trial at the Hague, Biden gave him a (family bloging) medal! ..."
"... A Clean Break: A New Strategy For Securing the Realm ..."
"... It's really sickening to see George W being "rehabilitated" and made to look like some kind of a senior statesman, when he should be hauled off to the Hague to spend the rest of his life in prison for war crimes. For me, his election in 2000 was mostly the beginning of the end of the rule of law in this country. As a result, the U.S. has Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, in addition to all the other events mentioned, and don't forget he tried to privatize Social Security. ..."
"... and welfare "reform", the crime bill. Talk of privatizing SSI made commonplace acceptable. Repeal of Glass Steagall. They were going to do to healthcare what oBLAM succeeded at, 20 years before him but got sidelined by Lewinsky's blue dress stains. Clintoon is a criminal and so is his spouse, and he did his share of damage everywhere. people who think otherwise might be looking back with nostalgia on a simpler (pre 9.11) time. ..."
"... Jeff Wells wrote some interesting essays in the Bush years, though many of his connections were a bit too far out, even for me. He had some striking collateral evidence for his concept of High Weirdness in high places "" sex abuse, torture and magick figuring prominently, juxtaposed with political skulduggery, and financial crimes and misdemeanours. The Gannon/Guckert affair, the Franklin ring and Gary Caradori were the sort of thing that laced his quite penetrating analyses of events. Facts were jumping off points for speculations, but given our lack of facts his imaginings were a nourishment of sorts, though often very troubling indeed. ..."
"... People have been brain washed by the glossed over history of the US they are taught. It gives people a false belief of our past. The phrase American Exceptionalism comes to mind. It is a myth. The real history is out there but you have to search it out. From it's beginning continuing to today our government is responsible for bad behavior. ..."
"... We Americans have this thing called exceptionalism which among other things creates the idea that our government is more virtuous than others. ..."
"... We are not at Hitler/Stalin/Mao standards ""yet"" but who's to say that could never happen here? One of the bafflements of the 20th century was how a civilized people descended into the dark barbarism of Nazi Germany. ..."
"... Noam Chomsky observed some thirty years ago that if the Nuremberg standards were applied to all the post-war American Presidents, then all of them would hang. ..."
"... We have such a dismal record. Little George was the most audacious of all our criminal presidents, but he has plenty of company. My question is now, looking back, why was the USA incapable of organizing a peaceful world after WW2? I start there. 1945. ..."
May 03, 2021 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Posted on April 25, 2021 by Lambert Strether

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Recently, the political class has been working hard to rehabilitate George W. Bush into an elder statesman, no doubt to continue the liberal Democrat conversion of suburban Republicans, with headlines like " George Bush reborn as the nation's grandfather " (the London Sunday Times, but you know it will migrate over here), " George W Bush is back "" but not all appreciate his new progressive image " (Guardian), " Bush calls on Congress to tone down "˜harsh rhetoric' about immigration " (CNN), and "George W Bush reveals who he voted for in 2020 election "" and it wasn't Biden or Trump " (the Independent. Bush wrote in Condaleeza Rice, who Exxon once named a tanker for). I could go on. But I won't. These stories from major outlets seem to be erasing early coverage like " The 7 worst moments of George W. Bush's presidency " (WaPo, 2013), " The blood on George W Bush's hands will never dry. Don't glorify this man " (The Guardian, 2017), " Reminder: George W. Bush Is Still Very, Very Bad " (Vice, 2018), " Seth Meyers: Don't Let Trump Make You Forget How Awful George W. Bush Was " (Vanity Fair, 2020), and " We Shouldn't Have to Remind People George W. Bush Was a Terrible President : (Jacobin, 2020). That's unfortunate, because George W. Bush (hereafter "Bush"; the "W" distinguishes him from his spook Yankee patrician Dad, oil bidnessman George H.W. Bush). As with so much else that is fetid in the miasmic air of our current liberal Democrat dispensation, Bush's rehabilitation begins with the Obamas, in this case Michelle Obama, in this iconic photo:

(The backstory: " Michelle Obama Reveals What Really Happened During Her Sweet Exchange With George W. Bush ," and "Michelle Obama: George W. Bush is "˜my partner in crime'[1] and "˜I love him to death' ").

Bush became President in the year 2000. That was "" let me break out my calculator "" 2021 "" 2000 = 21 years ago. It occurs to me that our younger readers, born in 2000, or even 1990, may not know how genuinely horrid Bush was, as President.

I was blogging even back then, and I remember how horrid Bush was; certainly worse than Trump, at least for Trump's first three years in office, until the Covid pandemic. To convey the full horror of the Bush years would not a series of posts, but a book. The entire experience was wretched and shameful.

Of the many horrors of the Bush years, I will pick three. (I am omitting many, many others, including Hurricane Katrina , the Plame Affair , Medicare Part D, the Cheney Energy Task Force , that time Dick Cheney shot an old man in the face , Bush's missing Texas Air National Guard records , Bush gaslighting the 2004 Republican National Convention with terror alerts, and on and on and on. And I didn't even get to 9/11, " You've covered your ass ," WMDs, and the AUMF. Sorry. It's exhausting.) I'm afraid my recounting of these incidents will be sketchy: I lived and blogged in them, and the memories of the horror well up in such volume and detail that I lose control of the material. Not only that, there was an actual, functioning blogosphere at that time, which did great work, but unfortunately most of that work has succumbed to link rot. And my memory of events two decades ago is not as strong as it could be.

The White House Iraq Group

Here I will rely on excerpts from Colonel Sam Gardiner's (PDF) "Truth from These Podia: Summary of a Study of Strategic Influence, Perception Management, Strategic Information Warfare and Strategic Psychological Operations in Gulf II" (2003), whose introduction has been saved from link rot by the National Security Archive and a full version by the University of Leeds . I would bet, long forgotten even by many of those who blogged through those times. ("Gulf II" is what we refer to as the "War in Iraq.") Quoting from the full version:

You will see in my analysis and comments that I do not accept the notion that the first casualty of war is truth. I think we have to have a higher standard. In the most basic sense, Washington and London did not trust the peoples of their democracies to come to right decisions. Truth became a casualty. When truth is a casualty, democracy receives collateral damage.

Seems familiar. (Gardiner's report can be read as a brilliant media critique; it's really worth sitting down with a cup of coffee and reading it all.)[2] More:

My research suggests there were over 50 stories manufactured or at least engineered that distorted the picture of Gulf II for the American and British people . I'll cover most in this report. At the end, I will also describe some stories that seem as if they were part of the strategic influence campaign although the evidence is only circumstantial.

What becomes important is not each story taken individually. If that were the case, it would probably seem only more of the same. If you were to look at them one at a time, you could conclude, "Okay we sort of knew that was happening." It is the pattern that becomes important. It's the summary of everything. To use a phrase often heard during the war, it's the mosaic. Recognizing I said I wouldn't exaggerate, it would not be an exaggeration to say the people of the United States and UK can find out more about the contents of a can of soup they buy than the contents of the can of worms they bought with the 2003 war in the Gulf.

The White House was, naturally, at the center of the operation:

One way to view how the US Government was organized to do the strategic communications effort before, during and after the war is to use the chart that was used by the Assistant Deputy Director for Information Operations. The center is the White House Office of Global Communications, the organization originally created by Karen Hughes as the Coalition Information Office. The White House is at the center of the strategic communications process"¦.

Handy chart:

And:

Inside the White House there was an Iraq Group that did policy direction and then the Office of Global Communications itself.

Membership of the White House Iraq Group:

So, in 2020 Bush's write-in vote for President was Condi Rice, the [x] Black [x] woman who helped run a domestic disinformation campaign for him in 2003, to sell the Iraq War to the American people. Isn't that"¦. sweet?

Of course, I was very naive at that point. I had come up as a Democrat, and my first real political engagement was the Clinton impeachment. Back in 2003, I was amazed to discover that there was a White House operation that was planting fake stories in the press "" and that I had been playing whackamole on them. At a higher level, I was disturbed that "Washington and London did not trust the peoples of their democracies to come to right decisions." Now it all seems perfectly normal, which is sad.

Torture at Abu Ghraib

There are a lot of images of our torture prison in Iraq, Abu Ghraib. This one ( via ) is not the most famous , but to me it is the most shocking:

What kind of country sets dogs on a naked prisoner? Well, my kind of country, apparently. (Later, I remember discussing politics with somebody who came from a country that might be considered less governed by the rule of law than my own, and they said: "Abu Ghraib. You have nothing to say." And they were right.)

For those who came in late, here's a snapshot (the detail of the story is in fact overwhelming, and I also have pity for the poor shlubs the brass tossed into that hellhole[3].) From the Los Angeles Times, " Few have faced consequences for abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq " (2015):

[A] 44-year-old Al Jazeera reporter named Salah Ejaili, said in a phone interview from Qatar that he was arrested in 2003 while covering an explosion in the Iraqi province of Diyala. He was held at Abu Ghraib for 48 days after six days in another facility, he said.

"Most of the pictures that came out in 2004, I saw that firsthand "" the human pyramid where men were stacked up naked on top of each other, people pulled around on leashes," he said in the interview, with one of his attorneys translating. "I used to hear loud screams during the torture sessions."

Ejaili says he was beaten, left naked and exposed to the elements for long periods, and left in solitary confinement, among other acts.

"When people look at others who are naked, they feel like they're animals in a zoo, in addition to being termed as criminals and as terrorists," he said. "That had a very strong psychological impact."

The plaintiffs also say they suffered electric shocks; deprivation of food, water and oxygen; sexual abuse; threats from dogs; beatings; and sensory deprivation.

Taha Yaseen Arraq Rashid, a laborer, says he was sexually abused by a woman while he was cuffed and shackled, and also that he was forced to watch a female prisoner's rape.

Ejaili said that his face was often covered during interrogations, making it difficult for him to identify those involved, but that he was able to notice that many of the interrogators who entered the facility wore civilian clothing.

His attorneys, citing military investigations into abuses at Abu Ghraib and other evidence, say the contractors took control of the prison and issued orders to uniformed military.

"Abu Ghraib was pretty chaotic," said Baher Azmy, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought suits against CACI and L-3 Services. "They were involved in a conspiracy with the military police to abuse our clients.""¦. Eleven U.S. soldiers were convicted in military trials of crimes related to the humiliation and abuse of the prisoners.

(So Abu Ghraib is a privatization story, too. Oddly, whoever signed the contract never ended up in court.) All this seemed pretty shocking then. But now we know that the Chicago Police Department ran a torture site at Homan Square while Rahm Emanuel, Obama's Chief of Staff, was Mayor , so perhaps this is all perfectly normal too.

Warrantless Surveillance and the Destruction of the Fourth Amendment

Here is the wording of the Fourth Amendment :

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers , and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

If our legal system had the slightest shred of integrity, it would be obvious to the Courts, as it is to a six-old-child, that what we laughingly call our "personal" computers and cellphones contain "paper," not in the tediously literal sense of a physical material made from wood fibre, but in the sense of content . Bits and bytes are 20th Century paper, stored on silicon and hard disk platters. Of course a warrant should be needed to read what's on my phone, ffs.

That Fourth Amendment common sense did not prevail is IMNSHO due in large part to Bush's program of warrantless surveillance, put in place as part of the Global War on Terror. Here again, the complexity is overwhelming and took several years to unravel. I'm afraid I have to quote Wikipedia on this one :

A week after the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF), which inaugurated the "War on Terror". It later featured heavily in arguments over the NSA program.

Soon after the 9/11 attacks President Bush established the President's Surveillance Program. As part of the program, the Terrorist Surveillance Program was established pursuant to an executive order that authorized the NSA to surveil certain telephone calls without obtaining a warrant (see 50 U.S.C. § 1802 50 U.S.C. § 1809). The complete details of the executive order are not public, but according to administration statements, the authorization covers communication originating overseas from or to a person suspected of having links to terrorist organizations or their affiliates even when the other party to the call is within the US.

In October 2001, Congress passed the Patriot Act, which granted the administration broad powers to fight terrorism. The Bush administration used these powers to bypass the FISC and directed the NSA to spy directly on al-Qaeda via a new NSA electronic surveillance program. Reports at the time indicate that an "apparently accidental" "glitch" resulted in the interception of communications that were between two U.S. parties. This act was challenged by multiple groups, including Congress, as unconstitutional.

The precise scope of the program remains secret, but the NSA was provided total, unsupervised access to all fiber-optic communications between the nation's largest telecommunication companies' major interconnected locations, encompassing phone conversations, email, Internet activity, text messages and corporate private network traffic .

Of course, all this is perfectly normal today. So much for the Fourth Amendment, good job. (You will note that the telcos had to be in on it; amusingly, the CEO of Qwest, the only telco that refused to participate, was charged and convicted of insider trading, good job again.) The legal aspects of all this are insanely complex, but as you see from my introduction, they should be simple.

Conclusion

Here's a video of the Iraqi (now in Parliament) who threw shoes at Bush (who got off lightly, all things considered):

https://www.youtube.com/embed/OM3Z_Kskl_U

We should all be throwing shoes at Bush, seriously if not literally. We should not be accepting candy from him. We should not be treating him as an elder statesman. Or a "partner in crime." We should not be admiring his paintings. Bush ran a bad, bad, bad administration and we are living with the consequences of his badness today. Bush is a bad man. We are ruled by bad people. Tomorrow, Obama!

NOTES

[1] Indeed.

[2] For example, I vividly remember playing whack-a-mole as a blogger with the following WMD stories: Drones, weapons labs, WMD cluster bombs, Scuds, nuclear materials from Niger, aluminum tubes, and dirty bombs. They one and all fell apart on close inspection. And they were only a small part of the operation, as Gardiner shows in detail.

[3] My personal speculation is that Dick Cheney had a direct feed from the Abu Ghraib torture chambers to the White House, and watched the proceedings live. Some of the soldiers burned images of torture onto CDs as trophies, and the prison also had a server, whose connectivity was very conveniently not revealed by the judge in a lawsuit I dimly remember being brought in Germany. So it goes.


flora , April 25, 2021 at 6:46 pm

Does anyone believe that W, son of H. W. Bush, H. W. son of Senator Prescott Bush, would have been been pres without that familial lineage and its important govt connections? The pity is W wasn't smart enough to grasp world politics and the US's importance as an accepted fulcrum in same beyond his momentary wants. imo. Brent Scowcroft and others warned him off his vain pursuits. The word "squander" come to mind, though I wish it did not.

flora , April 25, 2021 at 7:43 pm

See for example Kevin Phillips' book American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush . ( Kevin Phillips is a great modernist American historian, imo, who saw the rise of Nixon before anyone else.)

Teejay , April 27, 2021 at 10:16 am

" saw the rise of Nixon"? Phillips worked on the '68 campaign.

JTMcPhee , April 25, 2021 at 8:12 pm

Don't deny W his agency. As I followed the horrors, from Vietnam to Iraq to Syria to Central America and elsewhere, the full list that was visible anyway, of the W regime, it sure seemed clear to me that W played the bumbling yuk very well.

He did what he set out to do, no doubt with careful guidance from that sh!t of a father (magically turned into a laid-in-state "statesman") and mother-of-string-of-pearls, and of course Cheney and the rest of the corpo-gov policy gang.

The Consent Manufacturers are whitewashing an evil man and his slicker but equally evil successor and his glamorous spouse.

Helluva job, Georgie! Full marks for kicking the world a long way down a dark road.

anon y'mouse , April 26, 2021 at 12:24 pm

the dumb cluck thing was mostly an act. he was deliberately talking that way not only to paint himself as stupid, but also because those in power assume we must be spoken to as children (they've studied president speeches since JFK have decreased from high school level to 6th grade in complexity, word usage etc).

see Pelosi's daughter's film of his campaign trail. He's no Angel Merkel, but sly enough for politics in this country and most third world corruptocracies.

In our kayfabe duoparty system, it also gave the "opposing" side the "W is a Chimp" talking point to harp on (dress rehearsal for the same stuff against tRUMP).

Tom Stone , April 25, 2021 at 6:49 pm

Abu Ghraib was not an anomaly, Con Son Island served the same purpose during the Vietnam War. When I was young I was proud to be an American Citizen, we had the Bill of Rights, the Military was controlled by Civilians and their oath was to defend the Constitution from "All Enemies Foreign and Domestic.". I have been horrified, ashamed and deeply saddened by what has happened in the US over the last half Century or so.
And it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

ambrit , April 25, 2021 at 7:00 pm

You actually "˜blogged' back when we had to use punch cards to program our PCs? How oh how did you clamber on up out of "the Well" so many times a week? I am somewhat convinced that the Hollerith Cards Protocol was the origin of the Twitter 140 character limit.

I also "lived through" the "˜Reign of "W""˜ and see it as a Time of Prophecy. Most of the things we are now staring down the barrel of were effectuated then.

I may be foilly, (may be? who am I kidding,) but I view the 2000 election as a major turning point of American history.

albrt , April 25, 2021 at 7:20 pm

I view the 2008 election as the major failing-to-turn-back-when-we-had-the-chance point. Obama could have undone Bush's worst policies, but instead he cemented them into place forever.

Our elites are both stupid and evil, but Bush is more stupid and Obama is more evil.

drumlin woodchuckles , April 26, 2021 at 12:08 am

So was the 1963 " election at Dealey Plaza". Very pivotal.

Susan the other , April 26, 2021 at 1:56 pm

I go with JFK's assassination too. But little George is a close second.

Paul Whalen , April 26, 2021 at 6:42 am

you are 40 years off the mark-It was Reagan who's brand of avuncular fascism, celebrating stupidity as a virtue who paved the way.

Jason , April 26, 2021 at 6:59 am

All the pomp and circumstance surrounding the personage of the President serves to conceal the people behind the scenes who vetted and groomed said president, and actively advise him while in office. It's in this way that a Jimmy Carter may be viewed as a gentle soul so far as presidents go, but he was actually vetted by Brzezinski on behalf of the CFR goons. Once in office he was then advised by Brzezinski and Volcker, among other assorted lunatics. And he gladly took their advice the entire time. That's how he came to be president in the first place. And so it goes.

Ashburn , April 26, 2021 at 4:29 pm

albrt: I agree with your take. Obama campaigned as an anti-war candidate (at least wrt Iraq). He then proceeded to "˜surge' into Afghanistan and added Libya, Syria, and Yemen, to the regime change mix. Never a thought given to prosecuting the war criminals: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Tenet, Feith, Wolfowitz, Powell, et al; much less even consider a truth and reconciliation commission.

Obama was equally complicit in this never ending horror show and, I am hopeful, history will hold him equally accountable.

km , April 25, 2021 at 7:19 pm

Is it not written that Margaret Thatcher's true legacy was Tony Blair? If that is true, then the true legacy of Dubya is Obama.

Tom Doak , April 25, 2021 at 7:43 pm

That gives W too much credit. Obama continued the legacy of Cheney.

John Wright , April 25, 2021 at 9:58 pm

Could you explain your view that Obama and Trump are "worse than that" (Bush-Cheney).?

As far as harm that George W. Bush did and launched (illegal/immoral wars, domestic surveillance, tax cuts for the wealthy"¦.) Bush should take the award.

Obama did push for military action in Libya, but at least held back from Syria.

The administrations after Bush "kicked the can down the road" but he initiated the events they simply continued. And Trump did attempt to pull troops back from Bush initiated wars. How is Trump worse than Bush? What are your metrics?

drumlin woodchuckles , April 25, 2021 at 10:04 pm

I am just a commenter here, but I would say that . . .

When Obama deliberately and with malice aforethought turned all the admitted (and in fact proudly self-avowed) war-criminals and criminals-against humanity loose, free and clear under "look forward not back", he routinised and permanentized the up-to-that-very-minute irregular and extra-constitutional novel methods of governance and practice which the Cheney-Bush Administration had pioneered. Obama deliberately made torture, aggressive war, etc. "legal" when America does it and "permanent" as long as America is strong enough to keep doing it.

He did some other things like that which I don't have time to mention right now. Maybe others will beat me to it.

Most of all, by slickly conning or permitting to self-con numbers of people about "hope and change" to come from an Obama Administration, he destroyed all hope of hope. He destroyed hope itself. Hope is not a "thing" any more in this country, thanks to Obama.

He may also have destroyed black politicians' dreams of becoming America's " Second Black President" for several decades to come. Been there, done that. Never Again. But since I am not Black, that is not my problem. That is something Black America can thank Obama for, if they decide to wake up to the fact of that reality.

Of course , if the Evil Countess Draculamala becomes President after Biden, then I guess I will be proven wrong about that particular observation.

tegnost , April 25, 2021 at 10:47 pm

Bush was the set up guy, Obama was the closer

norm de plume , April 26, 2021 at 6:51 am

The Greatest Disappointment in History. No-one else comes close, in terms of the sheer numbers of people globally who he let down. The Bait and Switch King, The Great Betrayer. After the nightmare of Bush we got him and his "˜eloquence', pulling the wool over the dazzled sheeple's eyes while he entrenched the 1% and the neocon MI complex, his paymasters, and sponsors for his entry into the overclass.

Last, does any single person with the possible exception of Hillary Clinton, bear so much responsibility for the election of Trump?

quackery , April 26, 2021 at 7:57 am

When Obama campaigned for president he claimed he wanted to get rid of nuclear weapons. Instead, he upgraded the nuclear arsenal.

Mr Grumpy , April 26, 2021 at 10:28 am

It is ironic that the far right views Obama as the antichrist but they benefited from all of his policies.

Cat Burglar , April 26, 2021 at 11:19 am

Remember that Obama voted in favor of FISAA, the bill that immunized Bush and his flunkies from prosecution for their felony FISA violations, as a senator, not long before the presidential election. It was impossible to make myself vote for him after that.

Hotei , April 25, 2021 at 11:53 pm

Excellent documentation of that lineage here: http://www.obamatheconservative.com/

Norm Norton , April 26, 2021 at 11:14 am

"Is it not written that Margaret Thatcher's true legacy was Tony Blair?" If that is true, then the true legacy of Dubya is Obama."

And for Obama, Trump!

upstater , April 25, 2021 at 7:42 pm

Lambert, you forgot this one" Biden presents Liberty Medal to George and Laura Bush Instead of a war crimes trial at the Hague, Biden gave him a (family bloging) medal!

Jason , April 25, 2021 at 7:51 pm

Thanks Lambert. I'd add that the intelligence being sent to the "White House Iraq Group" was being manufactured by the Office of Special Plans (OSP) which was set up and run by Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz. Following Feith's history and connections alone is a fruitful endeavor for those so inclined.

Among other things, Feith co-authored, along with Richard Perle and David Wurmser, the A Clean Break: A New Strategy For Securing the Realm paper prepared for the prime minister of a certain foreign country. This is back in 1996. Around the same time the PNAC boys were formed by Kagan and Kristol and started selling the same policy prescriptions vis a vis Iraq to the pols and public here.

Feith was also fired from the NSC back in the early 80's for passing classified information to some little country. Fast forward to his OSP days and, lo and behold, his employee Larry Franklin is convicted of the same thing, along with Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman of AIPAC.

That's just a taste of the malfeasance.

John , April 25, 2021 at 8:26 pm

I guess sometimes people need to be reminded that water is wet. The Buddhists say that ignorance is the root poison. True dat. Especially in Amrika.

JTMcPhee , April 25, 2021 at 8:56 pm

This stuff has gone on forever. What amount of ventilation is needed to blow this kind of dung out of the Augean stables of geopolitics? Not much chance of that anyway, given all the incentives and and interests"

Is it luck that Putin and Xi might be a little less monstrous?

Elizabeth , April 25, 2021 at 10:20 pm

It's really sickening to see George W being "rehabilitated" and made to look like some kind of a senior statesman, when he should be hauled off to the Hague to spend the rest of his life in prison for war crimes. For me, his election in 2000 was mostly the beginning of the end of the rule of law in this country. As a result, the U.S. has Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, in addition to all the other events mentioned, and don't forget he tried to privatize Social Security.

His eight years as president, for me, was a horror show. What really bothers me is that he got away with all of it "" and now he's hailed as an eminence gris. I can't help but think that his rehabilitation is to remind us all of how bad Orange Man was "" Obama was just as bad because he cemented everything W did "" and more.

Thanks for the horrible memories.

Joe Hill , April 25, 2021 at 11:02 pm

I understand you disagree with the policies of Mr Bush, but war crimes?

Please describe what charges would be brought against him if you were to prosecute at a war crimes tribunal.

Yves Smith , April 26, 2021 at 3:23 am

That is an assignment, which is a violation of our written site Policies. This applies to reader comments when you could easily find the answer in less than 30 seconds on Google rather than being a jerk and challenging a reader (or even worse, me derivatively) on bogus grounds.

https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/28000/amr510972011en.pdf

Robert Gray , April 26, 2021 at 1:57 am

> For me, [W's] election in 2000 was mostly the beginning of the end of the rule of law in this country.

At this moment I'm writing it is still early days for this thread: there are only 24 comments. In these comments are named many bad people. However, one name that does not (yet) appear is "˜Clinton'. W was a monster as president (and likely remains a monster as a human being) but surely Billy Jeff needn't yield to him in his contempt for the rule of law.

Yves Smith , April 26, 2021 at 2:29 am

I loathe Bill Clinton but nothing he did approaches the Iraq War in the level of damage to the US and many foreign countries"¦.starting with Iraq.

Robert Gray , April 26, 2021 at 3:52 am

Quite right, of course. My comment was specifically in regard to his disdain for and abuse of the rule, and rôle, of law in the American polity, e.g., his perjury > disbarment. Sort of like the famous photograph of Nelson Rockefeller who, while serving as VP, was captured giving the finger to a group of protestors; Clinton also oozed that kind of hubristic impunity.

Alex Cox , April 26, 2021 at 12:01 pm

Regarding Clinton, the damage he caused to his own country and the world was substantial. The destruction of Yugoslavia caused considerable mayhem "" in addition to bombing and breaking apart a sovereign nation, it enabled "liberals" to feel good about war again, and paved the way for the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc.

And the damage done by NAFTA was enormous "" in terms of leading to deaths of despair in both the US and Mexico I suspect NAFTA has a higher domestic "body count" than any of the subsequent forever wars.

anon y'mouse , April 26, 2021 at 12:33 pm

and welfare "reform", the crime bill. Talk of privatizing SSI made commonplace acceptable. Repeal of Glass Steagall. They were going to do to healthcare what oBLAM succeeded at, 20 years before him but got sidelined by Lewinsky's blue dress stains. Clintoon is a criminal and so is his spouse, and he did his share of damage everywhere. people who think otherwise might be looking back with nostalgia on a simpler (pre 9.11) time.

little known covered up crime from his ARK days is the selling of HIV tainted blood (taken from prisoners) to Canada, among other things.

yet another who had credible rape allegations. which damages our image at home and abroad.

tegnost , April 25, 2021 at 10:36 pm

Total Information Awareness https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/preemption/tia.html

Adm. John Poindexter"¦ https://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/08/us/poindexter-is-found-guilty-of-all-5-criminal-charges-for-iran-contra-cover-up.html
yep, that one"¦

drumlin woodchuckles , April 26, 2021 at 12:14 am

I read that for the very briefest time, somebody or other was selling Total Information Awareness memorabilia with the Total Information Awareness symbol on it. I wish I had thought to buy a Total Information Awareness mug.

I imagine knockoffs and parodies exist, but I am not sure the real thing is findable any more.

Darius , April 25, 2021 at 10:43 pm

After Dennis Rader, the Wichita serial killer, murdered someone, the cops always found his semen on the floor next to the mutilated victim. He got sexual pleasure out of gruesome murder. This is how I always pictured Cheney's attitude toward torture. Well. I tried not to actually picture it.

Kevin Carhart , April 26, 2021 at 12:06 am

Bush also whipped votes for Kavanaugh, during the cuddly years.

https://theweek.com/speedreads/798796/george-w-bush-reportedly-working-phones-kavanaugh

Colonel Smithers , April 26, 2021 at 4:26 am

Thank you, KC.

Kavanaugh accompanied Bush fils on his state visit to the UK. Even then, Kavanaugh was being touted as a future Supreme Court judge.

The Rev Kev , April 26, 2021 at 3:48 am

Talk about your target rich environment. Where do you even start? Where do you begin? A serial business failure, draft dodger, military deserter, drunk driver "" and all that was before he became President. A man so incurious about the world "" just like Trump "" that he never even owned a passport until he actually became President and who never knew that Islam (prior to the Iraq invasion) , for example, was just not one religion but was divided into Sunni and Shia in the same way Christianity is divided into "" mostly "" Protestant and Catholics. But to me he was always the "Frat Boy President". His family always protected him from his many flaws and he never had to grow up like his father had to in WW2. Even as President he never grew into the job, again, just like Trump.

Lambert gives a few good reminders but there were many others and these are just the top of my head. He cared little for the US Constitution and called it nothing more than a goddamn scrap of paper. He officially made the US a torture nation, not only by pretending that US laws did not apply in Guantanamo bay but also aboard US Navy ships for which laws definitely did apply. As part of a movement to make America an oil-fueled hegemony for the 21st century, he invaded Iraq with the firm intention on invading Iran next so that Washington would have a firm grip on the fuel pump of the world. As he said "" "America is addicted to oil." He dropped the ball on 9/11 through over-obsessing on Iraq and in the immediate aftermath sent jets around the country "" when all jets were grounded "" to fly Saudi royalty back to Saudi Arabia before the FBI could interrogate them about all their knowledge of the attack. All this to hide his very deep connections with the Saudis.

I could go on for several more paragraphs but what would be the point? For the neocons he was a great fronts-man to be followed by a even greater one. I sometimes think that if Biden was a "˜real' Republican, then he would have been a great vice-president for Bush. And now the establishment and their trained seals in the media are trying to make him out as "America's Favourite Uncle" or something so that when he dies, he will have the same sort of funeral as John McCain did. And I predict that tens of thousands of veterans around the country will then raise their glasses to him "" and then pour the contents on the ground.

Colonel Smithers , April 26, 2021 at 4:22 am

Thank you, Lambert.

W's rehab continues in the UK MSM, not just the Independent. The worst offenders are probably the Grauniad and Channel 4, both Blairite.

The rehab mirrored the rise of Trump. His lack of interest in war upset these preachy imperialists.

Using Michelle Obama to facilitate the rehab brought id pol into the equation and made it easier. It was remarkable how often the above photo is used in the neo liberal and neo con media.

The Rev Kev , April 26, 2021 at 5:43 am

Thank you, Colonel. That foto is remarkable and I suspect that the origins for the idea for it may lay on the other side of the pond as it seemed so familiar-

https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/celebrity/article/3110070/netflixs-crown-shows-how-princess-diana-chose-her-own

drumlin woodchuckles , April 26, 2021 at 5:36 am

There is a blog called Rigorous Intuition 2.0. Many of its blogposts are about the Bush period and Bush related subjects and events. ( Many others are not). The sections on 9/11, Iraq, and Katrina probably have the highest percent of Bush-related blogposts, in case one is interested.

norm de plume , April 26, 2021 at 7:26 am

Jeff Wells wrote some interesting essays in the Bush years, though many of his connections were a bit too far out, even for me. He had some striking collateral evidence for his concept of High Weirdness in high places "" sex abuse, torture and magick figuring prominently, juxtaposed with political skulduggery, and financial crimes and misdemeanours. The Gannon/Guckert affair, the Franklin ring and Gary Caradori were the sort of thing that laced his quite penetrating analyses of events. Facts were jumping off points for speculations, but given our lack of facts his imaginings were a nourishment of sorts, though often very troubling indeed.

Tony massey , April 26, 2021 at 1:58 pm

Who needs to make shit up during those years?
The facts"¦the shit he actually did, was glossed over or simply forgotten.
If shit was made up about his sorry ass i didn't bother checking, Sir.
I just assumed it was true.
Bushies destroyed the country. If there's a country in 100 years they'll be paying for those years.
And then came obama and big Mike

jackiebass63 , April 26, 2021 at 6:14 am

People have been brain washed by the glossed over history of the US they are taught. It gives people a false belief of our past. The phrase American Exceptionalism comes to mind. It is a myth. The real history is out there but you have to search it out. From it's beginning continuing to today our government is responsible for bad behavior.

Some scholars like Noam Chomsky write about our real history. Unfortunately most people don't read this material. They are content with our glossed over shining star version of US history that unfortunately continues to be taught in our educational system , starting in elementary school continuing through a 4 year college education. Our system of government is so corrupted , I don't believe it can be fixed.

Jason , April 26, 2021 at 7:17 am

Arguing over degrees of presidential evil. Perfect.

farmboy , April 26, 2021 at 8:03 am

Nixon was rehabbed so he could open China, Kissinger got to keep his mantle. W portrayed by Josh Brolin pretty good take. Nice to see dunking on GW, but the cycle of rehabilitation is due. The question is can he do some good or is there too much mud on his boots. Can't see W as a new Jimmy Carter. Glossing over history begins the moment it's made. Makes me miss LBJ

Carlos Stoll , April 26, 2021 at 9:23 am

Between 1998 and 2000, under the rule of Saddam Hussein, about 1000 prisoners from Abu Ghraib prison were executed and buried in mass graves. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_prison How many Abu Ghraib prisoners did the US army execute?

The Rev Kev , April 26, 2021 at 9:48 am

Tell me again how many Iraqis were killed by the US Army because they were doing their own version of "Red Dawn"? And that tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would still be alive if Saddam was simply left in place. Here is a video to watch while you have a little think about it-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfvFpT-iypw (17:46 mins)

Phil in KC , April 27, 2021 at 8:02 am

We Americans have this thing called exceptionalism which among other things creates the idea that our government is more virtuous than others. It's a useful idea in that it calls us to be different and better than the average nation, and certainly different and better than a cruel dictatorship. But it's also a dangerous idea because too many of us actually believe it to be true. Our atrocities are different in kind, but the scale is the same.

We are not at Hitler/Stalin/Mao standards ""yet"" but who's to say that could never happen here? One of the bafflements of the 20th century was how a civilized people descended into the dark barbarism of Nazi Germany.

Deschain , April 26, 2021 at 10:55 am

"(I am omitting many, many others, including Hurricane Katrina, the Plame Affair, Medicare Part D, the Cheney Energy Task Force, that time Dick Cheney shot an old man in the face, Bush's missing Texas Air National Guard records, Bush gaslighting the 2004 Republican National Convention with terror alerts, and on and on and on. An I didn't even get to 9/11, "You've covered your ass," WMDs, and the AUMF. Sorry. It's exhausting.)"

You left out the housing bubble and the GFC!

Mr Grumpy , April 26, 2021 at 10:58 am

Agree with all the criticism of Bush, Cheney, Obama. On a lighter note, my father-in-law is a high tech oil prospector in W Texas, much of it in Midland, overlapping in time with W. Both members of the Petroleum Club (been there once, very stuffy) and worked out at the same gym. Naturally, my wife asked if he had ever seen W naked. Her dad wouldn't answer, but did turn beet red. We take this as confirmation.

Phil in KC , April 26, 2021 at 12:24 pm

Noam Chomsky observed some thirty years ago that if the Nuremberg standards were applied to all the post-war American Presidents, then all of them would hang. Chomsky could not have imagined the future sequence of presidents from that point forward, but certainly they did not break the chain of criminality. My point is that Bush is not unique in the type of crimes, just the enormity of them. But I also believe he set new standards (lower) for shamelessness. Remember his smirk?

But also remember Obama joking about killing people.

John Wright , April 26, 2021 at 3:25 pm

Remember the comedy skit in which GWB "looked" for Iraq WMD's in the Oval office as part of the White House Correspondent's dinner?

Anyone with any sense of decency would have refused to do this skit, but Bush apparently followed his handlers' advice to get some laughs. That the USA was led by someone of such limited talent for 8 years speaks volumes. Years ago, a New York Times reader wrote that Hillary Clinton is a "well-connected mediocrity".

That comment may be true for ALL of the recent political candidates, from both parties, for a great many years.

LBJ was definitely not mediocre (civil rights/war on poverty), and would be viewed far more favorably, maybe as great, if he had pulled out of Vietnam rather than escalating. Carter in his post presidency has much to recommend. Post presidency Bush is painting his portraits rather than having any retrospective regrets for the harm he did.

Susan the other , April 26, 2021 at 2:27 pm

We have such a dismal record. Little George was the most audacious of all our criminal presidents, but he has plenty of company. My question is now, looking back, why was the USA incapable of organizing a peaceful world after WW2? I start there. 1945. How did our ideology become so inept? And everything I have read about our failures over the years is contrasted with what might have been. We have operated under a system that could not function without extraction. There was always a sell-by date on the cover; one that we tried to ignore. There's no doubt in my mind that it has finally failed completely. Ignominiously. But we have also learned and come to admit certain realities. The most important one is that there can be no more war; civilization cannot survive a modern war. So, ironically, our advanced warfare might well bring a peaceful world without world war. And our advances in science (mostly militarily inspired) will help us now survive.

Sue inSoCal , April 26, 2021 at 4:56 pm

Lambert, thank you for this piece. I won't repeat what others have opined. I've had a real problem with Michelle Obama being the rehabilitation cheerleader leader for Dubya. Imho, we lost all of our rights under the odious Patriot Act, which was pre-written. Russ Feingold was the lone Senate holdout. And I recall Byrd's ire and rant at the tome they had no time to read, but he caved. It went downhill from there. The links below, (apologies, I don't know how to fashion a hot link..) are about Bush's crimes and Amnesty International's exhaustive investigation of them.

I don't have the citation anymore, and I've knocked myself out trying to find it. But there exists a UN human rights commission memo suggesting (?) Obama to do a number of things: hold Bushco accountable for war crimes etc, as well as address what is termed as "systematic racism" in incarceration (and more). I had printed it out a number of years ago and can't find it.)
I'm not buying that Bush fils is any elder statesman. He and his cronies used torture, extreme rendition, hired mercenaries and completely destabilized the Middle East. We still don't have our rights back, and I'm betting the Patriot Act will never go away. (Nor will data mining under the guise of "targeted advertising" and sold to..the military.) The NYT's link is how Obama elected to rug sweep and just move ahead! I look forward to Lambert's take on the Obama administration..

https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/28000/amr510972011en.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/12/us/politics/12inquire.html

techpioneer , April 26, 2021 at 4:56 pm

Finally, someone has the courage to point out the obvious. An excellent article, well researched and nicely nuanced.

I'm disappointed with the remedy proposed, however. Throwing shoes is not enough; it's merely symbolic. The potential crimes committed here, including lying us into war, the extent of torture committed, and practices that violate international military norms and intelligence require a transparent and impartial investigation. One possible venue is the International Criminal Courts in the Hague.

I've been told many times that sunlight can be an effective deterrent against disease.

[May 03, 2021] US/NATO Troops Patrolling Opium Poppy Fields in Afghanistan

May 03, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

uncle tungsten , Apr 28 2021 22:44 utc | 29

Hoarsewhisperer #10

Ditto. I am sure the CIA will be grinding the generals as we speak. Even the letter in Politico could well be one of their strategies. I posted a piece in the open thread yesterday from The HILL that was pure propaganda.

USA is not alone in losing guerrilla warfare.

Watch for Biden announcing a 'shake up' of the military command in the next few weeks/months.

The US military 2021 retreat from Kabul will result in a slaughter in the USA.

I see the Pentagon pulling the plug on the opium income for the CIA. Now THAT is the real war. So the CIA now has to pay its mercenary army to defend the harvest and extraction. That added cost to the CIA will not be taken lightly.

arby , Apr 28 2021 22:53 utc | 31

Posted by: uncle tungsten | Apr 28 2021 22:44 utc | 29

"So the CIA now has to pay its mercenary army to defend the harvest and extraction."

Seems to me it is the taxpayer that is paying for defending the fields.

US/NATO Troops Patrolling Opium Poppy Fields in Afghanistan

[May 03, 2021] A Lifetime -at War- -

Notable quotes:
"... By Tom Engelhardt. Originally published at TomDispatch ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... I supported the rule of law and human rights, not to mention the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. ..."
"... In these years, one key to so much of this is the fact that, as the Vietnam War began winding down in 1973, the draft was ended and war itself became a “voluntary†activity for Americans. In other words, it became ever easier not only to not protest American war-making, but to pay no attention to it or to the changing military that went with it. And that military was indeed altering and growing in remarkable ways. ..."
"... “The dislike of government spending, whether on public investment or consumption, is overcome by concentrating government expenditure on armaments†..."
"... “The dislike of government spending, whether on public investment or consumption, is overcome by concentrating government expenditure on armaments†..."
"... “Large-scale armaments are inseparable from the expansion of the armed forces and the preparation of plans for a war of conquest. They also induce competitive rearmament of other countries.†..."
May 03, 2021 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

A Lifetime “at War†Posted on April 30, 2021 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Englehardt describes how US war-making has been a continuing exercise starting with World War II. It’s important to recognize that before that, US military budgets were modest both in national and global terms. But with manufacturing less specialized, the US was able to turn a considerable amount of its productive capacity to armaments in fairly short order.

A second point is as someone who was in Manhattan on 9/11, I did not experience the attacks as war. I saw them as very impressive terrorism. However, I was appalled at how quickly individuals in positions of authority pushed sentiment in that direction. The attack was on a Tuesday (I had a blood draw and voted before I even realized Something Bad had happened). I was appalled to see the saber-rattling in Bush’s speech at the National Cathedral on Friday. On Sunday, I decided to go to the Unitarian Church around the corner. I was shocked to hear more martial-speak. And because the church was packed, I had to sit in the front on the floor, which meant I couldn’t duck out.

By Tom Engelhardt. Originally published at TomDispatch

Here’s the strange thing in an ever-stranger world: I was born in July 1944 in the midst of a devastating world war. That war ended in August 1945 with the atomic obliteration of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by the most devastating bombs in history up to that moment, given the sweet code names “Little Boy†and “Fat Man.â€

I was the littlest of boys at the time. More than three-quarters of a century has passed since, on September 2, 1945, Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and General Yoshijiro Umezu signed the Instrument of Surrender on the battleship U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay, officially ending World War II. That was V-J (for Victory over Japan) Day, but in a sense for me, my whole generation, and this country, war never really ended.

The United States has been at war, or at least in armed conflicts of various sorts, often in distant lands, for more or less my entire life. Yes, for some of those years, that war was “cold†(which often meant that such carnage, regularly sponsored by the CIA, happened largely off-screen and out of sight), but war as a way of life never really ended, not to this very moment.

In fact, as the decades went by, it would become the “infrastructure†in which Americans increasingly invested their tax dollars via aircraft carriers , trillion-dollar jet fighters, drones armed with Hellfire missiles, and the creation and maintenance of hundreds of military garrisons around the globe, rather than roads, bridges, or rail lines (no less the high-speed version of the same) here at home. During those same years, the Pentagon budget would grab an ever-larger percentage of federal discretionary spending and the full-scale annual investment in what has come to be known as the national security state would rise to a staggering $1.2 trillion or more.

In a sense, future V-J Days became inconceivable. There were no longer moments, even as wars ended, when some version of peace might descend and America’s vast military contingents could, as at the end of World War II, be significantly demobilized. The closest equivalent was undoubtedly the moment when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the Cold War officially ended, and the Washington establishment declared itself globally triumphant. But of course, the promised “peace dividend†would never be paid out as the first Gulf War with Iraq occurred that very year and the serious downsizing of the U.S. military (and the CIA) never happened.

Never-Ending War

Consider it typical that, when President Biden recently announced the official ending of the nearly 20-year-old American conflict in Afghanistan with the withdrawal of the last U.S. troops from that country by 9/11/21, it would functionally be paired with the news that the Pentagon budget was about to rise yet again from its record heights in the Trump years. “Only in America,†as retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore wrote recently, “do wars end and war budgets go up.â€

Buy the Book

Of course, even the ending of that never-ending Afghan War may prove exaggerated. In fact, let’s consider Afghanistan apart from the rest of this country’s war-making history for a moment. After all, if I had told you in 1978 that, of the 42 years to follow, the U.S. would be involved in war in a single country for 30 of them and asked you to identify it, I can guarantee that Afghanistan wouldn’t have been your pick. And yet so it’s been. From 1979 to 1989, there was the CIA-backed Islamist extremist war against the Soviet army there (to the tune of billions and billions of dollars). And yet the obvious lesson the Russians learned from that adventure, as their military limped home in defeat and the Soviet Union imploded not long after â€" that Afghanistan is indeed the “graveyard of empires†â€" clearly had no impact in Washington.

Or how do you explain the 19-plus years of warfare there that followed the 9/11 attacks, themselves committed by a small Islamist outfit, al-Qaeda, born as an American ally in that first Afghan War? Only recently, the invaluable Costs of War Project estimated that America’s second Afghan War has cost this country almost $2.3 trillion (not including the price of lifetime care for its vets) and has left at least 241,000 people dead, including 2,442 American service members. In 1978, after the disaster of the Vietnam War, had I assured you that such a never-ending failure of a conflict was in our future, you would undoubtedly have laughed in my face.

And yet, three decades later, the U.S. military high command still seems not faintly to have grasped the lesson that we “taught†the Russians and then experienced ourselves. As a result, according to recent reports, they have uniformly opposed President Biden’s decision to withdraw all American troops from that country by the 20th anniversary of 9/11. In fact, it’s not even clear that, by September 11, 2021, if the president’s proposal goes according to plan, that war will have truly ended. After all, the same military commanders and intelligence chiefs seem intent on organizing long-distance versions of that conflict or, as the New York Times put it , are determined to “fight from afar†there. They are evidently even considering establishing new bases in neighboring lands to do so.

America’s “forever wars†â€" once known as the Global War on Terror and, when the administration of George W. Bush launched it, proudly aimed at 60 countries â€" do seem to be slowly winding down. Unfortunately, other kinds of potential wars, especially new cold wars with China and Russia (involving new kinds of high-tech weaponry) only seem to be gearing up.

War in Our Time

In these years, one key to so much of this is the fact that, as the Vietnam War began winding down in 1973, the draft was ended and war itself became a “voluntary†activity for Americans. In other words, it became ever easier not only to not protest American war-making, but to pay no attention to it or to the changing military that went with it. And that military was indeed altering and growing in remarkable ways.

In the years that followed, for instance, the elite Green Berets of the Vietnam era would be incorporated into an ever more expansive set of Special Operations forces, up to 70,000 of them (larger, that is, than the armed forces of many countries). Those special operators would functionally become a second, more secretive American military embedded inside the larger force and largely freed from citizen oversight of any sort. In 2020, as Nick Turse reported, they would be stationed in a staggering 154 countries around the planet, often involved in semi-secret conflicts “in the shadows†that Americans would pay remarkably little attention to.

Since the Vietnam War, which roiled the politics of this nation and was protested in the streets of this country by an antiwar movement that came to include significant numbers of active-duty soldiers and veterans, war has played a remarkably recessive role in American life. Yes, there have been the endless thank-yous offered by citizens and corporations to “the troops.†But that’s where the attentiveness stops, while both political parties, year after endless year, remain remarkably supportive of a growing Pentagon budget and the industrial (that is, weapons-making) part of the military-industrial complex. War, American-style, may be forever, but â€" despite, for instance, the militarization of this country’s police and the way in which those wars came home to the Capitol last January 6th â€" it remains a remarkably distant reality for most Americans.

One explanation: though the U.S. has, as I’ve said, been functionally at war since 1941, there were just two times when this country felt war directly â€" on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and on September 11, 2001, when 19 mostly Saudi hijackers in commercial jets struck New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

And yet, in another sense, war has been and remains us. Let’s just consider some of that war-making for a moment. If you’re of a certain age, you can certainly call to mind the big wars: Korea (1950-1953), Vietnam (1954-1975) â€" and don’t forget the brutal bloodlettings in neighboring Laos and Cambodia as well â€" that first Gulf War of 1991, and the disastrous second one, the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Then, of course, there was that Global War on Terror that began soon after September 11, 2001, with the invasion of Afghanistan, only to spread to much of the rest of the Greater Middle East, and to significant parts of Africa. In March, for instance, the first 12 American special-ops trainers arrived in embattled Mozambique, just one more small extension of an already widespread American anti-Islamist terror role ( now failing ) across much of that continent.

And then, of course, there were the smaller conflicts (though not necessarily so to the people in the countries involved) that we’ve now generally forgotten about, the ones that I had to search my fading brain to recall. I mean, who today thinks much about President John F. Kennedy’s April 1961 CIA disaster at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba; or President Lyndon Johnson’s sending of 22,000 U.S. troops to the Dominican Republic in 1965 to “restore orderâ€; or President Ronald Reagan’s version of “aggressive self-defense†by U.S. Marines sent to Lebanon who, in October 1983, were attacked in their barracks by a suicide bomber, killing 241 of them; or the anti-Cuban invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada that same month in which 19 Americans were killed and 116 wounded?

And then, define and categorize them as you will, there were the CIA’s endless militarized attempts (sometimes with the help of the U.S. military) to intervene in the affairs of other countries, ranging from taking the nationalist side against Mao Zedong’s communist forces in China from 1945 to 1949 to stoking a small ongoing conflict in Tibet in the 1950s and early 1960s, and overthrowing the governments of Guatemala and Iran, among other places. There were an estimated 72 such interventions from 1947 to 1989, many warlike in nature. There were, for instance, the proxy conflicts in Central America, first in Nicaragua against the Sandinistas and then in El Salvador, bloody events even if few U.S. soldiers or CIA agents died in them. No, these were hardly “wars,†as traditionally defined, not all of them, though they did sometimes involve military coups and the like, but they were generally carnage-producing in the countries they were in. And that only begins to suggest the range of this country’s militarized interventions in the post-1945 era, as journalist William Blum’s “ A Brief History of Interventions †makes all too clear.

Whenever you look for the equivalent of a warless American moment, some reality trips you up. For instance, perhaps you had in mind the brief period between when the Red Army limped home in defeat from Afghanistan in 1989 and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, that moment when Washington politicians, initially shocked that the Cold War had ended so unexpectedly, declared themselves triumphant on Planet Earth. That brief period might almost have passed for “peace,†American-style, if the U.S. military under President George H. W. Bush hadn’t, in fact, invaded Panama (“Operation Just Causeâ€) as 1989 ended to get rid of its autocratic leader Manuel Noriega (a former CIA asset, by the way). Up to 3,000 Panamanians (including many civilians) died along with 23 American troops in that episode.

And then, of course, in January 1991 the First Gulf War began . It would result in perhaps 8,000 to 10,000 Iraqi deaths and “only†a few hundred deaths among the U.S.-led coalition of forces. Air strikes against Iraq would follow in the years to come. And let’s not forget that even Europe wasn’t exempt since, in 1999, during the presidency of Bill Clinton, the U.S. Air Force launched a destructive 10-week bombing campaign against the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia.

And all of this remains a distinctly incomplete list, especially in this century when something like 2 00,000 U.S. troops have regularly been stationed abroad and U.S. Special Operations forces have deployed to staggering numbers of countries, while American drones regularly attacked “terrorists†in nation after nation and American presidents quite literally became assassins-in-chief . To this day, what scholar and former CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson called an American “empire of bases†â€" a historically unprecedented 800 or more of them â€" across much of the planet remains untouched and, at any moment, there could be more to come from the country whose military budget at least equals those of the next 10 (yes, that’s 10!) countries combined, including China and Russia.

A Timeline of Carnage

The last three-quarters of this somewhat truncated post-World War II American Century have, in effect, been a timeline of carnage, though few in this country would notice or acknowledge that. After all, since 1945, Americans have only once been “at war†at home, when almost 3,000 civilians died in an attack meant to provoke â€" well, something like the war on terror that also become a war of terror and a spreader of terror movements in our world.

As journalist William Arkin recently argued , the U.S. has created a permanent war state meant to facilitate “endless war.†As he writes, at this very moment, our nation “is killing or bombing in perhaps 10 different countries,†possibly more, and there’s nothing remarkably out of the ordinary about that in our recent past.

The question that Americans seldom even think to ask is this: What if the U.S. were to begin to dismantle its empire of bases, repurpose so many of those militarized taxpayer dollars to our domestic needs, abandon this country’s focus on permanent war, and forsake the Pentagon as our holy church? What if, even briefly, the wars, conflicts, plots, killings, drone assassinations, all of it stopped?

What would our world actually be like if you simply declared peace and came home?


Hemanth Kumar , April 30, 2021 at 8:11 am

Here in Asia, many people think the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan was an act of flaying the dying horse, since Japan was staring at defeat even without the bombs. It was a totally callous act of the USA to drop the bombs just to “test their efficacyâ€.

Why then the bombs could not have dropped on Germany that was still waging war at that time? Asians smirk and say one) the “collateral†damage of radiation etc., to neighbours like France who were Allies and two) they were (and are) ‘whites’; unlike Japan and its neighbours.

NotTimothyGeithner , April 30, 2021 at 9:40 am

The war in Europe was over when the bomb was first tested.

The Rev Kev , April 30, 2021 at 9:43 am

I think that you have the dates mixed up. The war against Germany in Europe ended on May 7th and the testing of the first atom bomb was not until 16th July when the first bomb went off at Alamogordo in New Mexico. The following month the two remaining atom bombs that the US had were dropped on Japan. In short, the bombs arrived too late to use in Europe.

JBird4049 , April 30, 2021 at 3:57 pm

The bomb was built with Berlin being the first target, but because the war ended a year sooner than what everyone thought it would and making the very first bombs took longer than planned, it was used on Japan. It was probably used as a demonstration for the Soviets, but considering that sixty-six other large Japanese cities had already been completely destroyed by “conventional†firebombing, and in Tokyo’s case, with greater casualties than either nuclear bombing, the Bomb wasn’t really needed. The descriptions and the personal accounts of the destruction of Tokyo (or Dresden and Hamburg) are (if that is even possible) worse than of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Honestly, just what new and excitingly horrific ways of killing people the atom bomb used was not clearly understood. They generally thought of it as a bigger kaboom in a smaller package. And honestly, being pre-cremated during an entire night with your family and neighbors in the local bomb-shelter or dying after a few days, weeks, or even a month from radiation poisoning, is not really a difference is it?

WobblyTelomeres , April 30, 2021 at 6:28 pm

“More bang for the buck†is the phrase I heard years ago at Los Alamos.

John Wright , April 30, 2021 at 11:56 am

Another view has the dropping of the atomic bombs was a message, not to Japan, but to the Soviet Union.

From https://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/30/books/did-we-need-to-drop-it.html

“FOR 20 years after Harry Truman ordered the atomic bomb dropped on Japan in August 1945, most American scholars and citizens subscribed to the original, official version of the story: the President had acted to avert a horrendous invasion of Japan that could have cost 200,000 to 500,000 American lives. Then a young political economist named Gar Alperovitz published a book of ferocious revisionism, “Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam†(1965). While acknowledging the paucity of evidence available at the time, he argued that dropping the atomic bomb “was not needed to end the war or to save lives†but was Truman’s means of sending a chastening message to the Soviet Union.â€

Timh , April 30, 2021 at 1:32 pm

If we accept that at face value, then certainly the second bombing was unecessary. The threat would have been enough. But the US had a second bomb design to test…

BCD , April 30, 2021 at 4:13 pm

Few things working here. The US needed Japan to surrender quickly before Stalin invaded (which they asked him to do) so he couldn’t get his forces onto the island where the Allies couldn’t stop him. Most Japanese feared Stalin and preferred surrendering to the US but the Japanese government was trying to use talks with the USSR to get better terms than unconditional surrender (little did they know Stalin was licking his chops for more territory under his iron curtain).

The first bomb design (little man) was significantly less ambitious, it was so certain to function they never tested it because a study had proven there was almost no chance it would fail.

Fat boy was the scientific leap in technology needing to be demonstrated. Building little man was mostly a matter of enriching Uranium vs Fat boy Plutonium enrichment harder and detonation mechanism more complicated. However the end result was a bomb that could produce significantly higher yields with smaller amounts of fissionable material where both the size of the bomb could be significantly reduced and the yield of the device could be significantly scaled up at the same time.

Fat boy demonstrated the USA could someday be putting nukes on V2 rockets recently smuggled out of Germany. Even more important Fat boy is a precursor to the mechanism that initiates the H bomb fusion devices that Edward Teller would soon be Dr Strangloving.

Even after Trinity Fat boy still had very high odds of failure. They feared looking like fools if it failed and the USSR ended up with the Plutoniumt. As a result the US Air Force dropped little man first because it was certain to work. After the 1st bomb dropped, the Soviets declared war and began their invasion of Japan which forced Truman’s hand to drop Fat boy too. Even after Fat Boy, war mongers in Japan still refused to surrender where Emperor Hirohito finally overruled them and although there was a military coupe attempted, it failed.

Thus ended the most bloody conflict in the history of human kind.

Harold , April 30, 2021 at 7:52 pm

I’m not saying it isn’t true, but is there any actual evidence that the bombs were dropped as “a message to the Soviet Union†and not to speed the end of the war?

Also, who exactly wanted to send this “message� The US generals were against it, I understand.

Jason , April 30, 2021 at 9:23 pm

An apologia on bomb design, manufacture, and real-world application!

These ones weren’t even atomic:

https://i0.wp.com/wrongkindofgreen.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/libya-before-and-after-1.jpg

And look what they can do. Yay bombs.

Tom Pfotzer , April 30, 2021 at 9:25 am

“What would our world actually be like if you simply declared peace and came home?â€

a. All those families whose livelihood is based on waging war would have to find a new job. These people will fight tooth and nail to avoid change

b. The resource grabs by the rich people behind the Oz-like curtain would fail. Their fate would be that of the English aristocrats who have to rent out their castles in order to maintain a roof over their head. These people will fight tooth and nail to avoid change

c. The general public would have a fire-hose of newly-available resources to direct toward activities which benefit all the rest of the families outside A and B above

d. Fear-based leverage by the few over the many would be diminished. Attention would be re-directed toward valid problems we all face

=====

There’s an interesting question which I see posed from time to time, and often ask myself. It runs thus:

“Who decides who our “enemies†are, and why they are “enemies�

This is a fundamental question which I believe very few of us can currently answer accurately. Yet this question carries a $1.2T per year consequence. That’s a lot of money to allocate toward something we know nothing about.

One time I asked an acquaintance â€" who spent a career at CIA â€" that question. His reply was “Why, Congress decides who our enemies are, and why. Congress then tells the CIA what to doâ€.

I wasn’t sure if he truly believed that. It’s quite possible he did, of course, and I’m sure many of the people in group A above surely do think they’re doing honorable and patriotic work.

Group B above â€" the people who are actually moving the chess pieces of “the Great Game†â€" they are pretty clear on who defines our “enemies†and why they are “enemiesâ€. And they wisely don’t stand in front of podiums and explain their actions. These people aren’t visible, or explained, or known because it’s better for them not to be.

The way to combat manipulation by these predators is to:

a. Know them by their actions. Predators predate.
b. Don’t participate. In order for them to predate, they need minions. Don’t be a minion. Instead…
c. Be the giver, the creator and the constructor of things that are of no use to predators

NotTimothyGeithner , April 30, 2021 at 10:06 am

It’s not the soldiers but the contractors who live in dumpy overpriced holes like Northern Virginia.

As to your acquaintance, my godfather was in the CIA in the 60’s and a bit into the 70’s, and he might not say Congress as much as the President’s Chief of Staff as threat they choose what the President sees. You have to remember it’s primarily an organization of boring paper pushers looking to get promoted which requires political patronage. Imagine getting the Canada desk. You’ll be at a dead end unless you paint it as a grave threat. Then there is information overload and just the sheer size of the US. They would file reports, he mentioned an incident in Africa in the wake of decolonization when y godfather was stationed there that maybe warranted the President’s attention, but to get information to the President’s CoS took so long, it was in the President’s daily newspaper before the report could be handled. By then, why care, given the size of the US? Who can get to the Chief of Staff? Congress, so everyone else lobbies them. The CIA director is an appendage of the CoS.

When the President wants something, everyone jumps, but when the President doesn’t care, everyone is jockeying get for patronage.

HH , April 30, 2021 at 10:35 am

The war machine is sustained by plutocrats and their sociopathic flunkies in the national security state. How this works is clearly depicted in “The Devil’s Chessboard,†by David Talbot, a deeply depressing chronicle of how Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles did the dirty work of US corporations worldwide. The arrogance, impunity, and irresponsibility of these men established the framework of our secret government, which remains intact to this day.

It would be pleasant to believe that this evil persists because of public ignorance, but like the good Germans of the Nazi era, Americans accept that deception, torture, and murder are routinely practiced on our behalf to maintain our high standard of living and to keep us “safe.†The reverence for the operatives of the US national security state is evident throughout our popular culture, and that is a damning judgment on the American people.

Tom Pfotzer , April 30, 2021 at 11:17 am

Yes. Succinctly stated, and quite correct.

Of course the core problems are stationed at the place hardest to get to: right between our ears. This complicity disease runs deep and wide.

While I often succumb to that same despondency you mentioned, occasionally I interrupt the doom tape to notice that there’s a lot of people who are paddling hard toward a new ethos…like the posters here @ NC, for ex.

So today I’m going to indulge in a little happiness. Plant a tree. Do something good, something durable, something hopeful.

Something that offers no real hope of rent extraction potential.

:)

JBird4049 , April 30, 2021 at 8:53 pm

It was nice being accused of supporting the terrorists because I supported the rule of law and human rights, not to mention the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

WTF do some people think that the Founders wanted an extremely small army, a large organized militia, and passed the Bill of Rights? It was a reaction to what the British Army did to them (using much of the same tactics as the current “justice†system does today.) The ignorance and lack of thinking is really annoying.

Much of what the British military did was not good. Even now some of it would not be allowed in a court of law, but I do not recall them being nearly as violent, brutal, or deadly in their tactics while enforcing the King’s Law as the current regime or the local police are. That the milder British tactics caused a civil war with in a decade, and that the people then had less to fear from an occupying army as we do from “our†police is disturbing to think on.

But wars always come home, don’t they? Faux toughness on the supposed baddies here with claims of treason and insurrections on protests and riots now that often would hardly be in the news fifty years ago, so great was the protests and riots happening then. The cry to use the same tactics that did not work overseas to be used here at home. “To keep us safe.â€

Swamp Yankee , May 1, 2021 at 2:06 am

There’s truth to this, but once the war was really on, British and Tory/Loyalist brutality had decisive effects on public opinion, putting lots of people into the Whig/Patriot camp. Tom Paine makes great efforts to publicize British sexual assaults, looting, and general thugishness as they chase the Continental Army across New Jersey in 1776; the cruelty of backcountry British cavalry officers and Tory rangers in the Carolinas was legendary as the war reaches its latter phases.

And there was brutality on the other side, too, especially for Loyalist elites who faced a kind of “social death.†It was a war, after all, as well as a social revolution. It wasn’t France in 1789 or Russia in 1917, but it was rough, especially given the small population size.

FluffytheObeseCat , April 30, 2021 at 11:36 am

Except as Engelhardt just pointed out, the national security state does not “maintain our high standard of livingâ€. It’s an immense net drain on our standard of living. The only Americans made well-to-do or wealthy by it are those who are directly involved in supplying contract goods and services to the system.

FriarTuck , April 30, 2021 at 3:41 pm

I don’t know if Americans “accept†it as opposed to taking a dim view of being able to affect change.

The levers the average person has to change the behavior of the state is infinitesimal. Add to that the scope of action and Overton window mediated by the hypernormalized press ecosystem just means those in power get to act without restraint.

Hell, Obama literally said “We tortured some folks†and the media and government barely shrugged. To my knowledge, no one went to jail, no one was brought up in the Hague, and some of the same ghouls that perpetrated such crimes got cushy commenter jobs in the media.

Right now, localities can’t even keep their police from regularly killing citizens.

What does the average person do in the face of such things?

Jason , April 30, 2021 at 5:07 pm

Hell, Obama literally said “We tortured some folks†and the media and government barely shrugged. To my knowledge, no one went to jail, no one was brought up in the Hague, and some of the same ghouls that perpetrated such crimes got cushy commenter jobs in the media.

No one went to jail. Certainly no one went before the Hague. No bankers went to jail either. Even during the nutty Reagan administration, people went to jail for financial shenanigans. Some got long sentences. Hell, the Iran-Contra stuff was at least covered and people were indicted, even if they all got pardoned. Not anymore. These shenanigans are the norm and happen right out in the open. I’d imagine some of it’s been given legal cover. It seems like it’s become the expected behavior within these circles. To act otherwise â€" to attempt to be honest, in other words â€" is seen as weak and is mocked as fiercely as a weaker child on the playground might be.

It’s just a continuing regression. And as you note, it’s an excellent career builder:

“Looking for a job in mainstream media? Research has shown that reducing your sense of ethics and morality actually helps you get ahead.â€

John Wright , May 1, 2021 at 1:53 pm

I like to quote a radio advertisement that a local Northern California bail bondsman ran on one local radio station years ago.

“Friends don’t let friends do timeâ€.

LowellHighlander , April 30, 2021 at 10:59 am

Doubtless, Ms. Smith and Ms. Engelhardt have provided a key public service here. And I speak as a veteran, decorated for service in the War Over Oil (a.k.a. the “Persian Gulf Warâ€).

Between the vast economic inequality currently raging in our country, the social stratification enabled by access to colleges and universities accepted as “eliteâ€, the trashing of Constitutional protections (e.g. the 4th Amendment, now thoroughly eviscerated owing to the “PATRIOT ACTâ€), and the rampaging rule by “intelligence agencies†over foreign policy, I see no reason why any father should tell his children that this is a country worth fighting and dying for. [Think: China] Of course, the Empire â€" just as Rome did in its dying days â€" will be able to find enough desperately poor who will take the king’s shilling and don the uniform.

If anyone wishes to prove me wrong, let them work for a substantive “peace dividend†for a 2-3 years. Then we can sit down and talk; I’ll buy the ale.

tegnost , April 30, 2021 at 11:38 am

I think Englehart is a “Mr.†but I don’t want to get myself in trouble with the gender neutralization crowd

LowellHighlander , April 30, 2021 at 12:41 pm

oops; my apologies to all.

Rod , April 30, 2021 at 12:25 pm

And here is a nice companion reading alluding to Media collusion by a CNN colluder:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/29/opinions/lies-told-to-sustain-us-and-uk-mission-in-afghanistan-walsh/index.html

from the above article:

In these years, one key to so much of this is the fact that, as the Vietnam War began winding down in 1973, the draft was ended and war itself became a “voluntary†activity for Americans. In other words, it became ever easier not only to not protest American war-making, but to pay no attention to it or to the changing military that went with it. And that military was indeed altering and growing in remarkable ways.

Because, imo,

Since the Vietnam War, which roiled the politics of this nation and was protested in the streets of this country by an antiwar movement that came to include significant numbers of active-duty soldiers and veterans, war has played a remarkably recessive role in American life.

Despite having already ‘pledged’ at my Uncles Invitation, with the Draft’s End, I had great hope my future would see the great Peace Dividand rather than 9 more Opportunity Conflicts.
Little did that then 21 year old see the brilliance in that Pentagon Strategy.
I Now firmly support a No Exemption Draft for all post HS.
Military Service being only one, and a restricted one, of many counter-balancing options available for Public Service for that cohort.

Frank Little , April 30, 2021 at 12:42 pm

This article reminded me of one of the best Congressional Research Service reports that I’ve read: Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2020 . Despite being just a list of dates and locations with a brief description, it comes in at around 50 pages, which I think is a testament to how important foreign military engagement has been to the growth of the US even before 1945. Between these foreign wars and the genocidal war against the indigenous people of the continent I think it’s fair to say this country has been at war since its founding.

juno mas , April 30, 2021 at 6:16 pm

Correct. Even the so called Louisiana Purchase was not really a purchase of land, but a faux “option†to engage in land treaties with the native Americans;.the US chose Indian Wars and relocation treaties that have been violated repeatedly. (This territory is now known as the Red States.)

The rest of the land extending to the west coast was acquired through conquest with the new nation of Mexico. I guess the only real honest acquisition would be Seward’s Icebox.

JBird4049 , April 30, 2021 at 8:30 pm

>>I guess the only real honest acquisition would be Seward’s Icebox.

Alaska has only been inhabited for a few tens of thousands of years. I would think that the natives should have some say about who “owns†the land even though the Russian Empire did say that they did. The reasons sometimes included the use of guns. As for stealing Mexico’s territory, again that was, and in some areas still is, inhabited by natives who somehow became under the “governance†of New Spain or the country of Mexico despite not being asked about it and often still a majority part of the population in many areas when Mexico lost control.

Often, Europeans or Americans would show up somewhere, plant a flag, and say that they claimed or owned the very inhabited land, sometimes with farms and even entire cities. Rather arrogant, I would say.

Harold , April 30, 2021 at 8:49 pm

“Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.â€

juno mas , April 30, 2021 at 9:44 pm

I agree. Seward’s Icebox was not empty at time of sale. My understanding is that Seward thought it was. So faraway, so cold; no one would be living there, right?

As I’ve commented here many times, it was small pox not small bullets that allowed the Old World to take the New. There were estimates of 20 million native Americans living on the land now known as Mexico and the US. 90% were felled by Old World disease before Custer lost his scalp to the northern Plains Indians. In a fair fight the Indians would be enforcing the treaties.

It is amazing how the US continues to engage in war and still lose: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. . .Ukraine?

kgw , April 30, 2021 at 5:58 pm

I remember the words of Patrick Henry in his speech on the floor of the Virginia legislature debating the passing of the new constitution…

In particular, his views on the standing army : “What does a farmer in Virginia have to fear from a farmer in France?â€

Democracy Working , April 30, 2021 at 10:29 pm

For nearly a decade now every time I’ve read about the war in Afghanistan I’ve thought about Tim Kreider’s mordant 2011 cartoon We Could’ve Had The Moon, Instead We Get Afghanistan . Ten years later, that $432 billion has ballooned to $2.3 trillion (and more) and every word he wrote still stands. :-(

The author has retired from cartooning and now focuses on essay writing.

Sound of the Suburbs , May 1, 2021 at 4:37 am

We are going to have to halt the production lines.
The warehouses are full of bombs already, there is no more room.

Biden to the rescue; he’s started dropping bombs already.
When you have a large defence industry, you need war.
The only purpose is to use up the output from the defence industry.

This is what they realised in the 1940s, but we forgot.
http://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf

“The dislike of government spending, whether on public investment or
consumption, is overcome by concentrating government expenditure on
armamentsâ€

Sound of the Suburbs , May 1, 2021 at 4:47 am

Ran out of edit time.
Should be two quotes.

“The dislike of government spending, whether on public investment or consumption, is overcome by concentrating government expenditure on armamentsâ€

“Large-scale armaments are inseparable from the expansion of the armed forces and the preparation of plans for a war of conquest. They also induce competitive rearmament of other countries.â€

These were the lessons they learnt from the 1930s.

Susan the other , May 1, 2021 at 12:18 pm

So now, here we are. And how do we create a peaceful world? Refit the US military for a sustainable world. It will prove to be very useful. We and other advanced nations still have the advantage for prosperity but we should not abuse it. The whole idea back in 1945 was for the world to prosper. So I’ll just suggest my usual hack: Get rid of the profit motive. It’s pure mercantilism. And totally self defeating in a world seeking sustainability for everyone.

Philip Ebersole , May 1, 2021 at 1:35 pm

The Manhattan Project was an enormously expensive enterprise with two components â€" the development of a uranium bomb (Oak Ridge) and a plutonium bomb (Hanford, WA).

If no bomb had been used, the project would have been considered a waste of time, and there would have been a congressional investigation. If only one bomb had been used, half the cost would have been considered a waste.

I’m not saying these were the only reasons for dropping the bombs. The event was, as they say, “overdetermined.â€

[May 03, 2021] Biden is privatising the war in Afghanistan. 18,000 private contractors will stay behind to maintain a landing area for U.S. aircraft should the need arise.

May 03, 2021 | www.unz.com

Katrinka , says: April 30, 2021 at 11:36 am GMT • 15.8 hours ago

@KenH

Biden is privatising the war in Afghanistan. 18,000 private contractors will stay behind to maintain a landing area for U.S. aircraft should the need arise. According to war monger Lynn Cheney the "troops will never leave". The U.S. National Guard has been fighting undeclared wars all over the ME for twenty years and legislation is being proposed at the state level to end the abuse. I personally know one man who has done three tours in Iraq as a National Guardsman.

I totally agree with your comments concerning the U.S. government here at home. It is Bolshevism 2.0.

[May 03, 2021] U.S. Four Star Generals Ask DNI To Stop Lying

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Dear Director of National Intelligence, ..."
"... we, the the 4-star Generals leading U.S. regional commands all over the world, are increasingly concerned with about the lack of evidence for claims you make about our opponents. ..."
"... We, as true believers, do not doubt whatever judgment you make about the harmful activities of Russia, Iran and China. However - our allies and partners do not yet subscribe to the bliss of ignorance. They keep asking us for facts that support those judgments ..."
"... Unfortunately, we have none that we could provide. ..."
"... You say that Russia thought to manipulate Trump allies and to smear Biden , that Russia and Iran aimed to sway the 2020 election through covert campaigns and that China runs covert operations to influence members of Congress . ..."
"... Media reports have appeared in which 'intelligence sources' claim that Russia, China and Iran are all paying bounties to the Taliban for killing U.S. soldiers. Fortunately no soldier got hurt by those rumors. ..."
"... Our allies and partners read those and other reports and ask us for evidence. They want to know how exactly Russia, Iran and China are doing these things. ..."
"... They, of course, hope to learn from our experience to protect their own countries. ..."
"... Currently we are not able to provide them with such information. Your people keep telling our that all of it is SECRET. ..."
"... We therefore ask you to declassify the facts that support your judgments. * ..."
"... PS: * Either that or shut the fuck up. ..."
May 03, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

These folks have had it with the constant stream of baseless propaganda U.S. intelligence is spilling over the world:

Dear Director of National Intelligence,

we, the the 4-star Generals leading U.S. regional commands all over the world, are increasingly concerned with about the lack of evidence for claims you make about our opponents.

We, as true believers, do not doubt whatever judgment you make about the harmful activities of Russia, Iran and China. However - our allies and partners do not yet subscribe to the bliss of ignorance. They keep asking us for facts that support those judgments

Unfortunately, we have none that we could provide.

You say that Russia thought to manipulate Trump allies and to smear Biden , that Russia and Iran aimed to sway the 2020 election through covert campaigns and that China runs covert operations to influence members of Congress .

Media reports have appeared in which 'intelligence sources' claim that Russia, China and Iran are all paying bounties to the Taliban for killing U.S. soldiers. Fortunately no soldier got hurt by those rumors.

Our allies and partners read those and other reports and ask us for evidence. They want to know how exactly Russia, Iran and China are doing these things.

They, of course, hope to learn from our experience to protect their own countries.

Currently we are not able to provide them with such information. Your people keep telling our that all of it is SECRET.

We therefore ask you to declassify the facts that support your judgments. *

Sincerely

The Generals

----
PS: * Either that or shut the fuck up.

The above may well have been a draft for the letter behind this report :

America’s top spies say they are looking for ways to declassify and release more intelligence about adversaries’ bad behavior, after a group of four-star military commanders sent a rare and urgent plea asking for help in the information war against Russia and China.

The internal memo from nine regional military commanders last year, which was reviewed by POLITICO and not made public, implored spy agencies to provide more evidence to combat "pernicious conduct."

Only by "waging the truth in the public domain against America’s 21st century challengers†can Washington shore up support from American allies, they said. But efforts to compete in the battle of ideas, they added, are hamstrung by overly stringent secrecy practices.

“We request this help to better enable the US, and by extension its allies and partners, to win without fighting, to fight now in so-called gray zones, and to supply ammunition in the ongoing war of narratives," the commanders who oversee U.S. military forces in Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America, as well as special operations troops, wrote to then-acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire last January.

“Unfortunately, we continue to miss opportunities to clarify truth, counter distortions, puncture false narratives, and influence events in time to make a difference," they added.

The generals must have been seriously miffed to write such a letter. There have been a number of published intelligence judgments where the NSA had expressed low confidence in conclusions made mainly by the CIA. The NSA is part of the military.

Between two bureaucracies such an accusing letter or internal memo is the equivalent of a declaration of war. It is doubtful that the intelligence folks would win that fight.

That gives some hope that the Office of the DNI and the agencies below it will now lessen their production of nonsensical claims.

Posted by b on April 28, 2021 at 15:49 UTC | Permalink


Josh , Apr 28 2021 16:02 utc | 1

Right on man.
Thank You.
Kartoschka , Apr 28 2021 16:04 utc | 2
I hope you're right.
It could go the other way.
They will produce more "evidence"
psychohistorian , Apr 28 2021 16:12 utc | 3
Thanks for that b....is it rubber meets the road time?

I just read that the US is getting all its ambassadorial folk out of Afghanistan....maybe somebody is believing May 1 is a firmer deadline than the Biden 9/11 myth.

The shit show is about to crash, IMO, but if it is in slow motion, this crazy could go on for a while....what geo-political straw will break the camel's back?

Caliman , Apr 28 2021 16:25 utc | 4
Lewis Black, a pretty good US comedian, used to have a bit in the mid-2000's where he would ask the W administration flacks why they didn't just make up evidence about the Iraq WMDs after they "found out" that there were no weapons in the country. Black would tell them just make it up; we're used to it. Just give us an excuse to believe in the BS for God's sake; we'll do it!

I feel it's the same with our satrap nations around the world. At this time, is there anyone who does not understand that US foreign policy is conducted for and by MICIMATT (look it up)? So the generals have got nothing to worry about: keep pounding out that BS; there's a willing, able, and ready corps of salesmen and women in the media who will make enough of the public believe it for "democracy's" purposes.

Serg , Apr 28 2021 16:29 utc | 5
General Mackenzie who testified before the US House Armed Services Committee said Iran’s widespread use of drones means that the US is operating without complete air superiority for the first time since the Korean War.

Iran has time and again stated that its military capabilities are merely defensive and are designed to deter foreign threats.

https://politnew.com/politics/4796-gen-kenneth-mckenzie-iran-possesses-one-of-most-capable-militaries-in-the-middle-east.html

librul , Apr 28 2021 16:30 utc | 6
General Flynn had been head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (military).
The CIA was out to get him. It took a while but they eventually hamstrung him good.
gottlieb , Apr 28 2021 16:36 utc | 7
"Dear Generals, who haven't won a war in 75 years, so much for the DIA huh? We'd love to share our intelligence with you, our evidence showing the overwhelming and egregious misdeeds of our hateful, spiteful disgusting enemies, whose questioning of our Word should be met with charges of treason, but to give you evidence on top of our own unquestionable and 100% correct threat estimations, would compromise our Intelligence Gathering Methods which are of the strictest security and would threaten the ongoing ability of this Agency to gather and disseminate the unquestionable facts that without fear of contradiction we know is the truth. In short, dear Generals - work on winning a war, any war, and don't meddle in places that befuddle your ability to follow orders. Hooah! The CIA."
librul , Apr 28 2021 16:51 utc | 8
This fight has been ongoing for years.
Bottom line: The CIA wants to control the messages and narrative.

Article from 2013, great lead photo. Robert Mueller, James Clapper, John Brennan
and General Flynn all seated near each other.

https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2013/07/intel-wars-dia-cia-and-flynns-battle-consolidate-spying/66716/
Headline and subtext:

Intel Wars: DIA, CIA and Flynn’s Battle to Consolidate Spying
The Defense Department wants in on the spying game. But will the CIA block their efforts?


The CIA essentially absorbed the Pentagon’s only military-wide spying agency seven years ago [2006]
when the Defense HUMINT Service was dismantled -- and now, the Pentagon wants it back.

The CIA is quietly pushing the Armed Services committees along, hoping that Flynn’s DCS will be remembered by history as a failed power grab.

Canadian Cents , Apr 28 2021 17:10 utc | 11

The CIA/FBI/17+ known/unknown agencies are clearly a security apparatus that's gone out of control when even the USA's "nine regional [four-star general] military commanders" are out of the loop and pleading to be better informed. Worryingly, though, they ask for "ammunition in the ongoing war of narratives," which they apparently are ready to go right along with.

Western news media, of course, has become but a compliant weaponized appendage of that security apparatus, and democracy, which depends on informed voters, is nowhere in control of any of this.

Down this slippery slope, lies fascism.

rgl , Apr 28 2021 17:31 utc | 13

I do not see how this is possible. Every major event, from Vietnam, to JFK, to 9-11, and a myriad of others, had US lies baked into the cake. If the US ceased to lie, it would cease to function as America functions today. It would be incapable of empire.

The US establishment, from the President on down, is based on lies. They cannot survive on truth.

No. Nothing is going to change in this regard.

librul , Apr 28 2021 17:48 utc | 15

b ended his post with: " lessen their production of nonsensical claims."

"Nonsensical" misses the mark. They are *agenda-driven* claims.
I don't believe the Generals care one whit whether the spineless jellyfish pols
in other countries see through our lies. The Generals want the Pentagon to
have more participation in shaping the agenda and it's attendant narrative.

m , Apr 28 2021 18:13 utc | 17

The military used to be that part pf the US government apparatus ("deep state") that emphasized the value and importance of allies the most.

IMHO what is happening here is that the generals sense the imcreasing cracks in the US-centered alliance system. They attribute it to the work of the intelligence community, which is certainly a contributing factor, but thr real cause is the relative decline in US power and general unreliability due to political instability. The USA is less and less attractive as a partner. When the generals ask another country for a favour as they had been used to for decades they increasingly often get just questions and excuses in return.

Erelis , Apr 28 2021 20:31 utc | 26

Is this a sign of a struggle between the CIA and Pentagon as to who is the boss of foreign and war policy? Anybody remember when CIA supported jihadists were fighting Pentagon supported groups (were they jihadists?) in Syria. Seems like the Pentagon is the one deciding on relations with the Syrian Kurds, and not the CIA. Flynn was actively helping the Damascus with info about the CIA backed jihadists.

I would rather have the Pentagon win as they are not all that hot-to-trot for actual wars. The CIA should just go back to running US media, law makers, corporation and ruining civil liberties.

K_C_ , Apr 28 2021 22:26 utc | 28

Isn't it safe to assume that *anything* the CIA says publicly, either through direct channels or their co-opted corporate media, is false? Cue the Mike Pimpeo quote: "We lied, we cheated, we stole..." and of course the entire history of that useless agency, lol.

[May 03, 2021] Economic policy after the pandemic " Crooked Timber

May 03, 2021 | crookedtimber.org

Economic policy after the pandemic

by JOHN QUIGGIN on APRIL 30, 2021

I’m racing to get a draft manuscript of The Economic Consequences of the Pandemic , not helped by the fact that Biden keeps doing pretty much what I think he should do. More of the fold. Comments greatly appreciated, as always.

Like Keynes’ Londoner in the aftermath of the Great War, we are emerging from the pandemic into a world where the certitudes of the past have crumbled into dust. Balanced budgets, free trade, credit ratings, financial markets, above all free markets; these ideas have ceased to command any belief.

The failure of these ideas evident since the GFC and, in many respects, since the beginning of the 21st century. It have sunk in gradually as the neoliberal political class formed in the 1980s and 1990s has passed from the scene, replaced by younger people whose experience of financialised capitalism is almost entirely negative.

But it is only with the shock of the pandemic that the thinking of the past has completely lost its grip on the great majority. The absence of any serious resistance to Biden’s stimulus and infrastructure package reflects the fact that hardly anyone seriously believes the old verities of balanced budgets and free markets

Yet the fundamental realities of economic life remain unchanged. We can collectively consume or invest what we produce, nothing more and nothing less. And our productive capacity is constrained by resources and technology, as it always has been. One way or another we need to decide what goods and services will be produced and who will get to consume them.

What has changed is that the economic system we have used to allocate resources and investments for the last forty years is no longer fit for purpose. Financial markets are not repositories of wisdom and market discipline; rather they are, in Keynes words, gambling houses where ‘enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation.’ And as Keynes said ‘When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.’.

Unsurprisingly, the casino economy has delivered huge gains for a small number of winners, and losses for everyone else, certainly when compared to the broadly shared gains of the mid 20th century. But contrary to the claims of trickle-down advocates, these massive rewards have not generated increases in productivity. Profits are obtained, not by making a better product at lower cost, but by securing and holding a monopoly position.

How should we respond? The answer must be a combination of past, present and future. First, we need to look at the institutions of the 20th century Golden Age, and ask which can be revived and refurbished to address our current problems. Second, we must consider what elements of the neoliberal era are worth saving. Finally we must consider our future options in a world unlike anything that has come before.

The first step must be to look back at the institutions of the postwar Golden Age. Not all of these will turn out to be useful in our current situation, and some were inappropriate even at the time they operated. Nevertheless, taken all in all, the mixed economy of the mid-20th century worked much better than the system of financialised capitalism that prevailed in the era of neoliberalism.

Most of the policy program announced by the Biden Administration can be understood as a return to Golden Age policies wound back or abandoned in the neoliberal era. Examples include explicit support for unions, investment in physical infrastructure, partial repeal of the 2017 tax cuts, and free community college.

Unions, progressive taxes, expanding education â€" the case for all of these is as strong or stronger as it was in the aftermath of the Great Wars. Similarly, the need for public investment in physical infrastructure, after years of neglect, is evident. Biden’s measures so far are steps in the right direction, but much more remains to be done.

The innovations of the neoliberal era have mostly been negative. But there have been some positive developments. The movement towards racial and gender equality, which began in the 1960s continued, if slowly and with occasional reversals, through the neoliberal area. And some more specifically neoliberal policy innovations such as the earned income credit and emissions taxes have been value. Similarly, while most financial innovations have been harmful, there have been exceptions such as the rise of venture capital.

Looking to the future, the shift from an industrial to an information economy requires fundamentally new approaches to economics. We are still at the beginning of understanding what is needed here; but it is already obvious that the combination of financialized capitalism and Big Tech is not working out well as a solution.

GM and Google

The archetypal product of the 20th century industrial economy was the motor car, the archetypal technology was the production line and the archetypal firm was General Motors. Each car that rolled off GM’s production line embodied a set of physical and labour inputs; steel for the body, parts supplied by a network of subcontractors, the work of a large body of skilled and semi-skilled workers. Dealers and finance providers distributed the cars to buyers, who then owned and uses the products. Our thinking about how an economy works still reflects this model.

A 20th century firm like General Motors can easily be understood in terms of the economic categories of mainstream classical and neoclassical economists, beginning with Adam Smith. The whole apparatus of national accounting, reflected in concepts like GDP, was developed to deal with such firms.

But consider a firm like Google. Google doesn’t produce a physical good1; it doesn’t even generate the information that is at the core of its business. Rather, it indexes the information generated by others, with or without their permission, then allows users to search those indexes, with advertising attached.

Google doesn’t fit at all comfortably into the categories of traditional economics. Its output can’t be measured in quantitative terms, nor is there any obvious price attached to it. This hasn’t stopped Google making massive profits, or attaining a stratospheric market valuation. On the other hand, it is far from obvious that this is the best way of making the information resources of the Internet available to everyone.

1 Except for a relatively modest business producing tablet computers that run Google’s Chrome operating system.

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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }


Tim Worstall 04.30.21 at 12:39 pm ( 1 )

This is true:

“Its output can’t be measured in quantitative terms, nor is there any obvious price attached to it.â€

This connects with this:

“The whole apparatus of national accounting, reflected in concepts like GDP,â€

At which point we’ve a certain problem using measures like GDP to discuss the success and or failure of neoliberalism or even financialised capitalism. Because we’re already insisting that the archetypal firms of the neoliberal era aren’t well measured by GDP.

So insistences that growth was faster back in that Golden Age and so on become a little more difficult. So too insistences that living standards rose faster and all that.

We also end up with difficulties over something like this:

“Unsurprisingly, the casino economy has delivered huge gains for a small number of winners, and losses for everyone else, certainly when compared to the broadly shared gains of the mid 20th century. But contrary to the claims of trickle-down advocates, these massive rewards have not generated increases in productivity. Profits are obtained, not by making a better product at lower cost, but by securing and holding a monopoly position.â€

OK, Facebook, monopoly and all that. But increases in productivity? WhatsApp. You can talk to 1 billion people for free. OK, people might not say very much but still. There’s nothing of this in GDP â€" there’s no fee nor even advertising. Last time I asked Facebook about this they said “couple of hundred engineers†work on this. So, we’ve the costs of a couple of hundred engineers â€" $100 million including stock awards and office space? â€" in the national accounts. We’ve no corresponding output. This is a reduction in productivity.

But we’ve 1 billion people getting telecoms for free and this is a reduction in productivity?

Precisely because you’re saying that GDP doesn;t measure all this new economy stuff well it becomes very difficult to insist that this new economy stuff hasn;t worked well if the measure is going to be GDP…..

John Quiggin 05.01.21 at 12:35 am ( 2 )

That’s a problem with posting extracts. I’m well aware of these points and will deal with them. No time to respond in detail now, as I need to submit ASAP.

J-D 05.01.21 at 11:15 pm (no link)

Its output can’t be measured in quantitative terms, nor is there any obvious price attached to it.

So from this point of view Google’s product is already priced in the price of the stuff that is sold after being advertised through Google (directly or indirectly).

The people who pay money to Google are the advertisers. What they are paying Google for is advertising space. So Google’s product is advertising space. They create advertising space and sell it. Advertising space generally has a price. It is the price paid by advertisers to whomever it is that provides the advertisers with the advertising space. That’s not something new. It works for Google the same way it works, for example, for commercial free-to-air television and radio broadcasters. Their viewers and listeners are not the people who pay them for their product (just as Google users are not the people who pay Google); the advertisers are the people who pay them, and they pay them for the use of the advertising space which they have produced.

likbez 05.02.21 at 3:45 am (no link)

@J-D 05.01.21 at 11:15 pm (5)

So Google’s product is advertising space.

No only. Google was/is an integral part of PRISM. So mass surveillance is probably another major product and like Facebook it has several “facesâ€. With one is being a government sponsored surveillance company with Gmail and Android as the major franchises.

Any site that have Google advertisement can be considered as monitored by Google as Google essentially replicates Web logs via its advertising inserts. In this sense Google is an essential part of NSA.

They now try to diversify and get some foothold in the cloud but that’s also fit surveillance company profile.

All is all the old question “Is Google evil?†is an interesting one. IMHO it needs to be split into several companies.

>

[May 03, 2021] FISA And The Still Too Secret Police

With PRISM in place FICA court is redundant...
Notable quotes:
"... All an FBI supervisor has to do to get a FISA warrant on you is have one agent get a crooked snitch in a foreign country to send you a weird text message, and then have another bright eyed and bushy tailed agent who doesn't know the crook is a snitch write up a search warrant application affidavit and submit it to the FISA court. ..."
"... Nothing says "Unconstitutional (illegal) Deep State" like FISA. Hitler's Gestapo would be proud! ..."
"... Lisa and Peter removed any credibility the FBI had with the public. If they solved real crime they would go after the massive fraud and stolen ID criminals. Of course that takes real work and someone wanting get off their lazy rear end ..."
May 03, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by James Bovard,

The FBI continues to lawlessly use counterintelligence powers against American citizens...

The Deep State Referee just admitted that the FBI continues to commit uncounted violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA).

If you sought to report a crime to the FBI, an FBI agent may have illegally surveilled your email. Even if you merely volunteered for the FBI "Citizens Academy" program, the FBI may have illegally tracked all your online activity.

But the latest FBI offenses, like almost all prior FBI violations, are not a real problem, according to James Boasberg, presiding judge of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. That court, among other purposes, is supposed to safeguard Americans' constitutional right to privacy under FISA. FISA was originally enacted to create a narrow niche for foreign intelligence investigations that could be conducted without a warrant from a regular federal court. But as time passed, FISA morphed into an uncontrolled yet officially sanctioned privacy-trampling monster. FISA judges unleash the nuclear bomb of searches, authorizing the FBI "to conduct, simultaneous telephone, microphone, cell phone, e-mail and computer surveillance of the U.S. person target's home, workplace and vehicles," as well as "physical searches of the target's residence, office, vehicles, computer, safe deposit box and U.S. mails."

In 2008, after the George W. Bush administration's pervasive illegal warrantless wiretaps were exposed, Congress responded by enacting FISA amendments that formally entitled the National Security Agency to vacuum up mass amounts of emails and other communication, a swath of which is provided to the FBI. In 2018, the FISA court slammed the FBI for abusing that database with warrantless searches that violated Americans' rights. In lieu of obeying FISA, the FBI created a new Office of Internal Audit. Deja vu! Back in 2007, FBI agents were caught massively violating the Patriot Act by using National Security Letters to conduct thousands of illegal searches on Americans' personal data. Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) declared that an Inspector General report on the abusive searches "confirms the American people's worst fears about the Patriot Act." FBI chief Robert Mueller responded by creating a new Office of Integrity and Compliance as "another important step toward ensuring we fulfill our mission with an unswerving commitment to the rule of law." Be still my beating heart!

The FBI's promise to repent after the 2018 report sufficed for the FISA court to permit the FBI to continue plowing through the personal data it received from NSA. Monday's disclosure "a delayed release of a report by the court last November "revealed that the FBI has conducted warrantless searches of the data trove for "domestic terrorism," "public corruption and bribery," "health care fraud," and other targets "including people who notified the FBI of crimes and even repairmen entering FBI offices. As Spencer Ackerman wrote in the Daily Beast , "The FBI continues to perform warrantless searches through the NSA's most sensitive databases for routine criminal investigations." That type of search "potentially jeopardizes an accused person's ability to have a fair trial since warrantlessly acquired information is supposed to be inadmissible. The FBI claimed to the court that none of the warrantlessly queried material "˜was used in a criminal or civil proceeding,' but such usage at trial has happened before," Ackerman noted. Some illicit FBI searches involve vast dragnets. As the New York Times reported , an FBI agent in 2019 conducted a database search "using the identifiers of about 16,000 people, even though only seven of them had connections to an investigation."

In the report released Monday, Judge Boasberg lamented "apparent widespread violations" of the legal restrictions for FBI searches. Regardless, Boasberg kept the illicit search party going: "The Court is willing to again conclude that the . . . [FBI's] procedures meet statutory and Fourth Amendment requirements." "Willing to again conclude" sounds better than "close enough for constitutional."

At this point, Americans know only the abuses that the FBI chose to disclose to FISA judges. We have no idea how many other perhaps worse abuses may have occurred. For a hundred years, the FBI has buttressed its power by keeping a lid on its crimes. Unfortunately, the FISA Court has become nothing but Deep State window dressing "a facade giving the illusion that government is under the law. Consider Boasberg's recent ruling in the most brazen FISA abuse yet exposed. In December 2019, the Justice Department Inspector General reported that the FBI made "fundamental errors " and persistently deceived the FISA court to authorize surveilling a 2016 Trump presidential campaign official. The I.G. report said the FBI "drew almost entirely" from the Steele dossier to prove a "well-developed conspiracy" between Russians and the Trump campaign even though it was "unable to corroborate any of the specific substantive allegations against Carter Page" in that dossier, which was later debunked.

A former FBI assistant general counsel, Kevin Clinesmith, admitted to falsifying key evidence to secure the FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. As a Wall Street Journal editorial noted , Clinesmith "changed an email confirming Mr. Page had been a CIA source to one that said the exact opposite, explicitly adding the words "˜not a source' before he forwarded it." A federal prosecutor declared that the "resulting harm is immeasurable" from Clinesmith's action. But at the sentencing hearing, Boasberg gushed with sympathy, noting that Clinesmith "went from being an obscure government lawyer to standing in the eye of a media hurricane"¦ Mr. Clinesmith has lost his job in government service"what has given his life much of its meaning." Scorning the federal prosecutor's recommendation for jail time, Boasberg gave Clinesmith a wrist slap"400 hours of community service and 12 months of probation.

The FBI FISA frauds profoundly disrupted American politics for years and the din of belatedly debunked accusations of Trump colluding with Russia swayed plenty of votes in the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential election. But for the chief FISA judge, nothing matters except the plight of an FBI employee who lost his job after gross misconduct. This is the stark baseline Americans should remember when politicians, political appointees, and judges promise to protect them from future FBI abuses. The FISA court has been craven, almost beyond ridicule, perennially. Perhaps Boasberg was simply codifying a prerogative the FISA court previously awarded upon FBI officials. In 2005, after a deluge of false FBI claims in FISA warrants, FISA Presiding Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly proposed requiring FBI agents to swear to the accuracy of the information they presented. That never happened because it could have "slowed such investigations drastically," the Washington Post reported . So, FBI agents continue to lie with impunity to the judges.

The FISA court has gone from pretending that FBI violations don't occur to pretending that violations don't matter. Practically the only remaining task is for the FISA court to cease pretending Americans have any constitutional right to privacy . But if a sweeping new domestic terrorism law is passed, perhaps even that formal acknowledgement will be unnecessary. Beginning in 2006, the court rubber-stamped FBI requests that bizarrely claimed that the telephone records of all Americans were "relevant" to a terrorism investigation under the Patriot Act, thereby enabling NSA data seizures later denounced by a federal judge as "almost Orwellian." FISA could become a peril to far more Americans if Congress formally creates a new domestic terrorism offense and a new category for expanding FISA searches.

The backlash from Democrats after the January 6 clash at the Capitol showcased the demand for federal crackdowns on extremists who doubted Biden's election, disparaged federal prerogatives, or otherwise earned congressional ire. If a domestic terrorism law is passed, the FBI will feel as little constrained by the details of the statute as it does about FISA's technicalities. Will FBI agents conducting warrantless searches rely on the same harebrained standard the NSA used to target Americans: "someone searching the web for suspicious stuff"? Unfortunately, unless an FBI whistleblower with the same courage as former NSA analyst Edward Snowden steps forward, we may never know the extent of FBI abuses


ebworthen 39 minutes ago

"You want to harass a political opponent? Sure, we can do that...

JaxPavan 42 minutes ago

All an FBI supervisor has to do to get a FISA warrant on you is have one agent get a crooked snitch in a foreign country to send you a weird text message, and then have another bright eyed and bushy tailed agent who doesn't know the crook is a snitch write up a search warrant application affidavit and submit it to the FISA court.

Joe Bribem 32 minutes ago

It's almost like we did this to Trump. But it'll never come to light. Oops it did. Not that anything will happen to us because we own the corrupt DOJ and FBI.

Obama's own personal private army.

You_Cant_Quit_Me 7 minutes ago

A lot of tips come in from overseas. For example, the US spies on citizens of another country and then sends that country tips, in exchange that country does the same by spying on US citizens and sending the FBI tips. Then it starts, "we are just following up on a tip"

wee-weed up 36 minutes ago (Edited)

Nothing says "Unconstitutional (illegal) Deep State" like FISA. Hitler's Gestapo would be proud!

You_Cant_Quit_Me 37 minutes ago

Lisa and Peter removed any credibility the FBI had with the public. If they solved real crime they would go after the massive fraud and stolen ID criminals. Of course that takes real work and someone wanting get off their lazy rear end

takeaction 58 minutes ago (Edited)

If you own a smart phone...everything you do is recorded...and logged. "They" have been listening to you for a long time if they want to.

If you own any smart device...they can listen and watch. They are monitoring what I am typing and this site. There really is no way to hide.

[Apr 24, 2021] The State-Corporate Convergence In Our State Of Emergency - ZeroHedge

Apr 24, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

The enrollment of corporations in the scheme to vaccinate the population and to require such vaccinations for social participation should not be considered in terms of the prerogatives of private organizations but as part of the incursions of the state into private industry. What we are witnessing, and should be resisting, is a merger into a corporate-government complex, wherein government can bypass the legislative branch and enforce unpopular mandates by colluding with corporations and other organizations to make "policy."

Perhaps the most egregious element of this corporate-state stranglehold on the population is the participation of Big Digital and the mainstream media. Big Digital conglomerates eliminate media outlets and voices that challenge the official covid narrative, including information about lockdowns, masking, and vaccinations, although the official narrative has not only changed willy-nilly but also has been proven factually wrong, as well as socially devastating. Big Digital and the media serve both the state and Big Pharma by eliminating oppositional views regarding the lockdowns, masks, and vaccines, and by pushing fear-inducing propaganda about the virus and its ever-proliferating variants.

As I have written in Google Archipelago , Big Digital must be considered an agent of a leftist authoritarian state -- as a " governmentality " or state apparatus functioning on behalf and as part of the state itself. "Governmentality" is a term that should become well known in the coming days and weeks. I adopted the term from Michel Foucault and have emended it to refer to corporations and other nonstate actors who actively undertake state functions. These actors will be doing this in droves with vaccine passports, which will vastly augment state power under a state-corporate alliance.

Similarly, other major corporations perform state-sanctioned roles by echoing and enforcing state-approved ideologies, policies, and politics: indoctrinating employees, issuing woke advertisements, policing the opinions of workers, firing dissidents, and soon demanding vaccine passports from employees and customers.

The overall tendency, then, is toward corporate-state monopolization over all aspects of life, with increasing control by approved principals over information and opinion, economic production, and the political sphere. As the consolidation accelerates, the broad global state will require the elimination of noncompliant, disaffected, and "untrustworthy" economic and political actors. In the United States, with the elimination of political opposition, the tendency is toward uniparty rule, and with it, the merging of the party and state into a singular organ.
play_arrow


PGR88 2 hours ago (Edited)

The only way the fascist deep state ends is with a currency collapse. That could be effected immediately - arrest the members of the Federal Reserve. Without a printed, fiat dollar, and the illusion that $30 Trillion in debt will repaid - the leftist, DC deep state collapses immediately.

BDB 13 hours ago remove link

The US govt is a corporation.

We as a central banking nation have an economic and political monopoly that is trying really hard to maintain fascist control.All the big multinationals are owned by the banksters too.

Psyop covID19 and man's co2 emissions causes climate change are both lies pushing a political agenda

https://notpublicaddress.wordpress.com/2020/08/08/how-to-create-your-own-novel-virususing-computer-software/

trailer park boys 12 hours ago

" Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." Benito Mussolini

HonorSeeker 11 hours ago (Edited)

Under Fascism, the government wrote the rules. Under our corporatist system, it's the corporations. At least that's what I would say the difference is.

DesertEagle 9 hours ago

We're under the boot heel of billionaire oligarchs and big corporations that are their handmaidens. They are toxic and will never take their boot off of our neck unless they are forced to.

[Apr 19, 2021] What Does Google Do With My Data

Apr 19, 2021 | www.avast.com

More than most companies today, Google understands that information is power. But how much does Google know about you? Here, we'll unpack Google's privacy policy, so that you know what data gets tracked, how Google uses your data, and how to manage your online privacy. How_Google_uses_your_data-Hero

If you use a Google service or product (and you probably do), it's important to educate yourself about how Google uses your data so you can make smart, informed decisions that keep you in control of your privacy. Every step you take, every purchase you make -- Google could be watching you.

This article contains:

Is Google really spying on me?

The simple answer is yes: Google collects data about how you use its devices, apps, and services. This ranges from your browsing behavior, Gmail and YouTube activity, location history, Google searches, online purchases, and more. Basically, anything that's connected to Google is likely used to collect data on your activity and preferences.

Many people have questions about Google collecting data and how it gathers information. In particular, people worry about voice-activated products like Google Home and Google Assistant being used to listen to more than just requests to buy toilet paper or play music in the living room.

Nearly every company you interact with online uses web tracking technology to mine data about your online habits and preferences to personalize your experiences and the content you see.

While the security risks of smart home devices are real, Google using your home assistant to record your private conversations isn't one of them. You might feel like you're being spied on, but the reality is that Google sees only the information you have voluntarily entered or allowed them to access .

It's tempting to cast Google as a villain in this scenario, but Google data collection isn't unique. Nearly every company you interact with online uses web tracking technology to mine data about your online habits and preferences to personalize your experiences and the content you see. Still, it might surprise you how much data Google actually tracks and the less obvious ways it keeps tabs on you.

Why does Google want my data?

You might be thinking, "Fine, Google knows a lot about me. But what does Google do with my data?" According to Google, they use all this data to deliver better services, make improvements, and customize your experience . In other words, all this information helps Google make its services more useful for you.

With data about your behavior and preferences, Google can deliver better, more personalized services. Google uses data about your behavior and preferences to deliver better or more personalized services.

Of course, there's a very thin line between useful and creepy -- and sometimes businesses make the mistake of taking it too far by hoovering up excessive amounts of data. For many companies, more data collection means more profit. Here are a few ways in which Google data collection can impact your digital lifestyle.

Targeted advertising

With all the data Google gathers about you -- across all of its platforms, services, products, and devices -- it can build a detailed advertising profile, including your gender, age range, job industry, and interests. This helps them use targeted advertising to serve you Google ads that align with your personal tastes.

Let's say you search for a place to rent skis. Afterward, you start seeing ads for related products like ski jackets on other websites you visit around the web -- these are targeted ads . If you want to see what Google thinks it knows about you, you can go to your Google account settings , click on Data & personalization in the left navigation panel, and view your advertising profile.

Location tracking

Where you go, Google goes. Whether you're looking for the quickest way to get to a meeting, searching for a nearby cafe, or trying to find the closest bus stop, Google uses your location to offer personalized suggestions that are more relevant to your situation. For instance, maybe you'd like to see a movie after work. If you search Google for listings, you might see the showtimes for movies playing at theaters close to your office.

Improving usability

The more data, the better the quality of the service. Google uses all the data it collects to improve usability -- and your information alone can't do all the work. Google also analyzes billions of other people's data across different apps to make its services more useful for everyone.

For example, when you use Google Maps (or Waze -- yes, it's also part of the Google family), your location is anonymously sent back to Google and combined with data from people around you to create a picture of current traffic patterns. Have you ever been rerouted around an accident or a traffic jam while driving? You can thank your data and all the data from the people driving around you.

Tweaking algorithms

Google's search algorithms -- the rules that determine the results you see and the order they're listed in -- are continually changing. In 2019, the company reported more than 3,500 improvements to Google search -- that's an average of nearly 10 every day.

Google uses data about what people search for, what results are relevant, and the quality of the content and sources to determine the results you see. And their engineers adjust and refine Google's search algorithms to make searching on Google more useful , such as generating useful featured content snippets from relevant third-party websites to provide quick answers to questions right at the top of the search results page.

Trendspotting and analysis

Your search results also power Google Trends , a Google website that tracks and analyzes the top search queries across services like Google Search, YouTube, and more. You can see the most popular search terms from multiple countries and languages, helping you discover the latest trends, topics, and stories across different regions and over different time periods.

To be clear, no one outside of Google (and maybe even no one inside) truly knows how this data is processed and used. But they don't hide what they collect and how they do it. Google's privacy policy is written clearly and easy to understand.

... ... ...

[Apr 12, 2021] Google's Secret 'Project Bernanke' Revealed in Texas Antitrust Case

Apr 12, 2021 | www.wsj.com

By Jeff Horwitz and Keach Hagey Updated April 11, 2021 11:41 am ET

Listen to this article 6 minutes 00:00 / 05:50 1x

Google for years operated a secret program that used data from past bids in the company's digital advertising exchange to allegedly give its own ad-buying system an advantage over competitors, according to court documents filed in a Texas antitrust lawsuit.

The program, known as "Project Bernanke," wasn't disclosed to publishers who sold ads through Google's ad-buying systems. It generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the company annually, the documents show. In its lawsuit, Texas alleges that the project gave Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., GOOG 0.90% an unfair competitive advantage over rivals.

Google's Ad Machine
Online ads are typically sold in auctions that happen in an instant, when a user's webpage is loading. Google dominates at virtually every step of the process. In an antitrust lawsuit, Texas alleges that Google's secret "Project Bernanke" allowed the company to use knowledge it gained running its ad exchange to unfairly compete against rivals. Here's how the digital advertising machine works:

THE SELL SIDE: PUBLISHERS

AD SPACE

FOR SALE

When a user visits a large online publisher's website or app, the publisher uses an ad server to sell ad space on its pages.

The publisher also gives the exchange information about the reader -- their age, income, browsing history and interests, for example.

In this example, the publisher uses Google's DoubleClick for Publishers, the leading ad-serving tool.

The tool puts the publisher's ad space up for sale on exchanges , marketplaces where transactions happen in real-time between sellers ( publishers ) and buyers ( advertisers ).

REAL-TIME

AUCTION HOUSES

Google has the largest such marketplace, the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, or AdX.

THE BUY SIDE: ADVERTISERS

An advertiser, representing its clients' products, uses sophisticated buying tools to purchase ads.

In this example, an advertiser uses Google's buying tool, DV360, the industry leader.

The advertiser can specify the types of audiences it wants to target -- such as location, gender or age of user -- and the price of their offer.

To get its ad in front of the user, the advertiser places bids in the auction marketplace -- the highest bidder wins.

Once a match is made on the exchange, an ad pops up on users' screens.

The documents filed this week were part of Google's initial response to the Texas-led antitrust lawsuit , which was filed in December and accused the search company of running a digital-ad monopoly that harmed both ad-industry competitors and publishers. This week's filing, viewed by The Wall Street Journal, wasn't properly redacted when uploaded to the court's public docket. A federal judge let Google refile it under seal.

Some of the unredacted contents of the document were earlier disclosed by MLex, an antitrust-focused news outlet.

The document sheds further light on the state's case against Google, along with the search company's defense.

Much of the lawsuit involves the interplay of Google's roles as both the operator of a major ad exchange -- which Google likens to the New York Stock Exchange in marketing documents -- and a representative of buyers and sellers on the exchange. Google also acts as an ad buyer in its own right, selling ads on its own properties such as search and YouTube through these same systems.

Texas alleges that Google used its access to data from publishers' ad servers -- where more than 90% of large publishers use Google to sell their digital ad space -- to guide advertisers toward the price they would have to bid to secure an ad placement.

Google's use of bidding information, Texas alleges, amounted to insider trading in digital-ad markets. Because Google had exclusive information about what other ad buyers were willing to pay, the state says, it could unfairly compete against rival ad-buying tools and pay publishers less on its winning bids for ad inventory .

The unredacted documents show that Texas claims Project Bernanke is a critical part of that effort.

TECH FRENEMIES

How tech giants are both cooperating while competing in hardware, software and technology services

Google acknowledged the existence of Project Bernanke in its response and said in the filing that "the details of Project Bernanke's operations are not disclosed to publishers."

Google denied in the documents that there was anything inappropriate about using the exclusive information it possessed to inform bids, calling it "comparable to data maintained by other buying tools."

Peter Schottenfels, a Google spokesman, said the complaint "misrepresents many aspects of our ad tech business. We look forward to making our case in court." He referred the Journal to an analysis conducted by a U.K. regulator that concluded that Google didn't appear to have had an advantage.

The Texas attorney general's office didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

Google's outsize role in the digital-ad market is both controversial and at times murky.

In some instances, "we're on both the buy side and the sell side," Google Chief Economist Hal Varian said at a 2019 antitrust conference held by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Asked how the company managed those roles, Mr. Varian said the topic was "too detailed for the audience, and me."

[Apr 07, 2021] This use of "crony this" and "crony that" needs to stop. It is fascism. Not communism, not socialism...

Apr 07, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Foe Jaws 8 hours ago

The globalists are behaving just like the Bolsheviks of old. It is down right scary to see this happen in America. We lost the major cities 40 or 50 years ago and now the entire country (except that 1 percent stealing all the money) is on the verge of going 3rd world banana republic.

drjd 6 hours ago

If this was truly "communism", would 1% be stealing all the money? Why don't we just call it what it really is: "globalist crony capitalism."

YuriTheClown 2 hours ago

The internationalists are behaving just like the Bolsheviks of old.

You must not know your history. High powered US bankers prop up the big Bolshevik names in New York until it was time to loose them on Russia. Then they financed the whole operation.

And who is financing the Bolsheviks in the USA now???

artless 1 hour ago remove link

The word you are looking for is fascism. This use of "crony this" and "crony that" along with ANY use of the word capitalism-because their is nothing capitalist about any of this- needs to stop. It is fascism. Not communism, not socialism...

words matter.

[Mar 30, 2021] Even before the targets in Yemen had been "legally" designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization Obama used cluster bombs to shred dozens of women and children in a failed attempt to hit members of "al Qaida in Yemen (AQY)".

Mar 30, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

librul , Mar 30 2021 13:04 utc | 1

Even before the targets in Yemen had been "legally" designated as
a Foreign Terrorist Organization Obama used cluster bombs to shred
dozens of women and children in a failed attempt to hit members of
"al Qaida in Yemen (AQY)".
.
The war crime immediately became a dirty Obama secret, covered up
with the help of the MSM, in particular ABC.
.
An enthusiastic White House had leaked to their contacts at ABC that
Obama had escalated the War on Terror, taking it to another country,
Yemen. This was December 17, 2009 only days after Obama had returned
from his ceremony in Oslo where he proudly accepted the Nobel Peace
Prize.
.
ABC was thrilled with their scoop and in manly voices announced
the escalation in the War on Terror.
.
The very next day ABC went silent forever about it, joining the cover up
of a war crime.
.
Hillary Clinton, by the way, committed her own act of cover up.
Covering her butt by backdating a memo.
.
The designation of a organization as a FTO (Foreign Terrorist Organization)
is not official nor legal until it is published in the Federal Register.
An oversight? Obama attacked Yemen before Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
had done the paperwork to make the killing legal?
.
The designation was not published until a month later, January 19, 2010.
Hillary Clinton back dated the memo she published in the Register with the date of
December 14, 2009, to somewhat cover her butt.
.
Obama's acceptance speech in Oslo for the Nobel Peace Prize was December 10th.
.
Yemen leaders agreed to participate in Obama's coverup saying it was their
own Yemen forces that had accidentally shredded dozens of women and children.
.
Obama was grateful to the Yemen leaders. The Yemen leaders were not
honored in Oslo. But, ironically, Obama ended his speech honoring women
and children, days before he ordered their slaughter.
.
Obama in Oslo, December 10, 2009:
.
"Somewhere today, a mother facing punishing poverty
still takes the time to teach her child, scrapes together what
few coins she has to send that child to school -- because she
believes that a cruel world still has a place for that child's
dreams.
.
Let us live by their example. We can acknowledge that oppression will
always be with us, and still strive for justice. We can admit the
intractability of deprivation, and still strive for dignity. Clear-eyed,
we can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace.
We can do that -- for that is the story of human progress; that's the
.
hope
.
of all the world; and at this moment of challenge,
that must be our work here on Earth.
.
Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
.
One week later Obama shredded dozens of women and children in Yemen
and covered it up.
.
Here is ABC's Brian Ross using his most masculine voice to boast about Obama's attack:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHcg3TNSRPs
.
Wikileaks cable corroborates evidence of US airstrikes in Yemen (Amnesty Intl)
https://www.amnesty.org/en/press-releases/2010/12/wikileaks-cable-corroborates-evidence-us-airstrikes-yemen/
.
Actual cable at Wikileaks:
https://search.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/10SANAA4_a.html
.
More at ABC [12/18/2009]:
https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cruise-missiles-strike-yemen/story?id=9375236
https://web.archive.org/web/20190624203826/https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cruise-missiles-strike-yemen/story?id=9375236 ">https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cruise-missiles-strike-yemen/story?id=9375236">https://web.archive.org/web/20190624203826/https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cruise-missiles-strike-yemen/story?id=9375236
https://web.archive.org/web/20190725171012/https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cr ">https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cr">https://web.archive.org/web/20190725171012/https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cr

Norwegian , Mar 30 2021 15:09 utc | 10

@librul | Mar 30 2021 13:04 utc | 1

You can thank Thorbjørn Jagland for the Obama Nobel Price. He and Stoltenberg were buddies in the same party.

[Mar 26, 2021] All wars are bankers wars

Mar 24, 2021 | www.unz.com

Mefobills , says: March 24, 2021 at 2:02 pm GMT

History doesn't repeat, but it sure as hell rhymes.

The Revolutionary and Civil war was fought against finance capital; where said capital emanated mostly from London. By 1912 the U.S. was no longer Industrial Capitalist, but had been usurped by Finance Capitalism, and of course the (((usual suspects))) were pulling strings in the background.

WW2 was the now finance capitalist allies against the industrial capitalist axis powers.

The run up to WW2 had the axis "industrial capitalist" powers exit the London based finance capitalist "sterling" system. Churchill even admitted to the reason why the allies attacked.

http://www.renegadetribune.com/winston-churchill-germanys-unforgivable-crime/

Germany's most unforgivable crime before the Second World War was her attempt to extricate her economic power from the world's trading system and to create her own exchange mechanism which would deny (((world finance))) its opportunity to profit.

Finance capital exported jobs from the U.S. and the West toward China; this in order to take wage arbitrage. China then rope-a-dopes the dummies from the west, and uses its state credit and industrial capitalist system to acquire intellectual know-how, and climb the industrial curve.

Finance capitalist are slowly being cut-out of taking wage arbitrage from China and realize that their "assets" over there, can be taken by the Chinese state at any time. Now they want war to secure their asset position, and to buy more of China at a war time fire sale price.

Finance capital runs the same playbook over and over. The bad guys won in WW1 and 2. The (((international))) finance class works behind the scenes to take sordid gain on humanity, including mass death.

If your government is festooned with ne0-con Jews, then that should be strong signal that your country is not sovereign, but instead is operated by stealth with finance capital and its oligarchs.

This time around is different, China and Russia will exit the dollar system, and the western finance capitalist class can do nothing but make idle threats. Some will argue that the West will resort to nukes.

Maybe? I'm assuming that our (((friends))) are not completely insane, as they would lose their capital and asset position. Their greed will stop them from destroying themselves, and us.

Rev. Spooner , says: March 24, 2021 at 3:42 pm GMT • 10.8 hours ago

"If your government is festooned with ne0-con Jews, then that should be strong signal that your country is not sovereign, but instead is operated by stealth with finance capital and its oligarchs. "
You are a wise man Mefobills

Rurik , says: March 24, 2021 at 4:42 pm GMT • 9.8 hours ago
@Mefobills

If your government is festooned with ne0-con Jews, then that should be strong signal that your country is not sovereign, but instead is operated by stealth with finance capital and its oligarchs.

"When the law no longer protects you from the corrupt, but protects the corrupt from you – you know your nation is doomed."

And she would know.

[Mar 26, 2021] The net result of neocon policies of Biden administration

Money spend on military adventures of the neoliberal empire are money stolen from common people
Mar 26, 2021 | www.unz.com

Jeff Davis , says: March 24, 2021 at 5:11 pm GMT • 9.3 hours ago

@ko

Actually, it is the ***American people*** who are fucked. The little people that is. Fucked on behalf of Israel/Neocons, the MIC, the Neolibs, and the other "owners" of the country.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/rsL6mKxtOlQ?feature=oembed

The good news is that when the above have thoroughly looted the country, and the rest of the world sheds the by then worthless US dollar, and the City on the Hill becomes the Toothless Slum on the Hill,

[Mar 26, 2021] Stavridis "oversaw operations in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria."

Mar 26, 2021 | www.unz.com

annamaria , says: March 24, 2021 at 8:07 pm GMT • 2.0 days ago

@Anonymous that a strong American military and national security posture is the best guarantor of peace and the survival of our values and civilization.

Stavridis has been at the forefront of the mass slaughter known as the implementation of the Oded Yinon Plan for Eretz Israel:

From 2002 to 2004, Stavridis commanded Enterprise Carrier Strike Group, conducting combat operations in the Persian Gulf in support of both Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.

Stavridis "oversaw operations in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria." In short, this prominent racketeer is dripping with the blood of hundreds of thousands of the victims.

[Mar 06, 2021] This proposition requires the occupied bartering away their land and amending their borders, always for the benefit of the illegal occupier. These 'negotiations' are expressly forbidden by the Geneva Conventions. Every functioning government in the world knows this.

Mar 06, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Paul , Mar 4 2021 21:57 utc | 37

Thanks b for the research and journalism.

One of the favourite tropes of the transparent cabal who have seized power in the US and other captive nations is that the solution to the Palestine/Israel problem is "the path to peace is through direct negotiations.'

This proposition requires the occupied bartering away their land and amending their borders, always for the benefit of the illegal occupier. These 'negotiations' are expressly forbidden by the Geneva Conventions. Every functioning government in the world knows this.

The alien invaders are under an obligation to simply get out. Every 'agreement' is null and void.

The New Zealand government and the NZ superannuation fund has recently decided to divest their investments in Israeli banks citing international law, the Geneva Conventions and reputation damage as key factors.

Read the decision making document here:

https://www.nzsuperfund.nz/assets/documents/responsible-investment/R-GNZS-IC-Paper-Exclusion-of-Israeli-Banks-January-2021.pdf

Expect a MSM wall of silence on this one.

It is sheer hypocrisy for the usual suspects to talk about human rights, rules based international law, democracy and our values, while advocating the opposite policies in the middle east.

Is it possible they actually believe their own propaganda and their own lies through Bernays like repartition?

[Mar 06, 2021] pfizer not the USA, wants military bases

Mar 06, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

snake , Mar 4 2021 21:42 utc | 32

pfizer not the USA, wants military bases
very interesting.. extension of the office of the president to a private corporation

This does not comport with Article II(Section 2) of the USA constitution.. which says
"The President shall be the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the usa, and of the Militia of the serveral states, when into the actual service of the USA,

but no where do I find a private corporation may exercise the power of the Office of the President ...? What did I mis?

[Mar 06, 2021] Andy Ngo's UNMASKED- Antifa -- Not -Anarcho-Communism-, But Anarcho-Tyranny by James Kirkpatrick

The important fact that emerges is that Antifa is state sponsored group (or at least some government agencies sponsored group) not unlike NSDAP was in Germany.
Feb 27, 2021 | www.unz.com

Andy Ngo's new book Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy is as important to understanding where we are today as Ann Coulter's Adios America! was before Donald Trump election. Ngo shows that far from being just an "idea," as President Joe Biden would have us believe , Antifa comprises highly organized groups of dedicated activists with an extreme political agenda and a commitment to violence. But Ngo also shows, perhaps less consciously, that Antifa operates with de-facto backing from the Ruling Class, including Main Stream Media journalists, the principal enforcers of the current order. Ngo suggests Antifa are a revolutionary threat to the power structure and could overthrow it. But the truth is much worse -- Antifa are simply the System's militant wing.

What makes Unmasked so remarkable is that Ngo doesn't limit himself to anecdotal reporting, nor does he retreat to abstract theorizing. Instead, like a great historian, he seamlessly integrates his experiences and other primary sources with political theory. He shows, often literally with chapter and verse, what motivates Antifa, how they are organized, how they are trained, and how this is turned into concrete action:

Where there is no single capital A 'Antifa' organization with one leader, there are indeed localized cells and groups with formalized structures and memberships. Though officially leaderless, these are organizations by every definition.

The [ Rose City Antifa ] curriculum is modeled on a university course. Yet it includes training on how to use guns and do reconnaissance against enemies.

Ngo also helpfully reports on the history the Antifa brand, especially its origins in the Red Front Fighters' League of the pre-Hitler German Communist Party. He's especially astute to note that "the German Communist Party [KPD] and its various offshoots viewed social democrats and liberals as 'social fascists' no different from Nazis." Needless to say, KPD leader Ernst Thälman 's strategy of fighting the more moderate Social Democrats ahead of the Nazis was glossed over by Communist propaganda after World War II. East German hagiographies of Thälman, like Sohn Seiner Klasse and Führer Sonne Klasse ("Son of His Class," "Leader of His Class") portray him as fighting the Nazis above all else.

Ngo also describes "anti-fascism's" parallels with the East German regime. After all, the Berlin Wall was formally called the "Anti Fascist Protection Rampart." The East German secret police, the so-called Stasi, resemble nothing so much as today's journalists (and FBI) complaining that they can't tattle on people listening to Clubhouse [ From Clubhouse to Twitter Spaces, social media grapples with live audio moderation , by Elizabeth Culliford, Reuters, February 25, 2021].

When Ngo describes the Communist takeovers of East Germany and Vietnam, the latter of which his family fled, he's warning Americans that we face a Communist coup . Historically, "anti-fascism" was created by, and has always been a front for, Communist or Communist-adjacent groups.

(I don't dispute Ngo's characterization of the movement as "anarchist-communist." It sounds clumsy, but anarcho-communism is a venerable Leftist tradition that goes back to Marx's great rival Mikhail Bakunin. I was surprised, though, that Ngo didn't mention that the three-arrow "Iron Front" symbol widely used by Antifa today actually came from the German Social Democratic Party (SPD.) The SPD opposed the Communists just as much as they did monarchists and the National Socialists.

Ngo has been physically attacked by Antifa -- causing him a brain injury -- and says the conservative meme that Antifa are all physically weak isn't true: they are violent and dangerous .

He's right, but when looking at what Antifa prioritize today, it does seem preoccupied with boutique progressive causes like transgenderism and policing speech. While physical attacks are common, doxing and complaining to capitalist employers are what Antifa do best of all.

Indeed, it's hard to imagine East Germany or the USSR tolerating the cultural degeneracy championed by today's Antifa. The Soviet Bloc was positively social-conservative compared to 2021 post-America.

Ngo's reporting on the specific individuals, curriculum, tactics, and operational plans of Antifa are a testament to his skill as a researcher (not mention his guts.) However, one thing jumps out of the book repeatedly. Despite all their emphasis on "OpSec" and paranoia about law enforcement, Antifa aren't actually especially secret. Like illegal aliens who lecture us on television about their lives " in the shadows ," it's not a huge mystery who is in Antifa. We know what groups exist, where they operate and what they are doing. They openly operate on Twitter, Facebook etc.

In contrast to the Proud Boys or bewildered Boomers who wandered into the Capitol last month, Antifa can operate openly because it has the tacit approval of law enforcement and Main Stream Media outlets . Thus Ngo describes in shocking detail Antifa groups' training workshops, including combat training. Right-wing activity even at this level would be shut down by the government instantly.

It's an obvious point but bears repeating -- how radical are your opinions when you have police, the military, corporate America, and the media all supporting you? Antifa violence exists because it is permitted, arguably encouraged, to exist. Despite President Trump's blustering promises, these Antifa groups were never labeled "terrorists" nor, inexplicably, was systematic federal law enforcement action ever taken against them.

During the CHAZ insurrection , Antifa was allowed to more or less claim sovereignty in a major American city for a period of weeks. If nationalists had tried that, it would have ended in drone strikes. The glee with which progressives hailed the execution of Ashli Barrett tells us what they're willing to do. The "Capitol Insurrection" would have been heralded as another Bastille Day had it come from the other side .

Antifa is faux rebellion. None of these people have ever faced real opposition in their lives. And when groups like the Proud Boys did emerge to challenge them -- and actually started winning, for example at the Battle of Berkeley -- the state intervened to save Antifa. See FBI Arrests White "Serial Rioters" -- And Ignores Antifa , Proud Boys Persecution: Four Years For Fighting Back , and Ann Coulter On Jake Gardner: Innocent Until Proven Trump Supporter .

Ngo points out repeatedly that Antifa conduct themselves to present a certain media image. Yet this is a two-way relationship. While Antifa are eager to make sure only their narrative gets out, Regime journalists willingly collaborate. It's a mistake to even speak of journalists or Antifa as being separate categories of people.

After all, we know that journalists change their coverage to help Antifa present their narrative. Consider New York Times hackette Taylor Lorenz, who recently started an online controversy by accusing someone of using a slur on the Clubhouse application [ New York Times' Taylor Lorenz blasted for false claim tech entrepreneur used 'r-slur' on social media app , by Joseph Wulfsohn, Foxnews, February 8, 2021].

But back in 2017, Lorenz reported from Charlottesville Unite The Right rally that she had been punched by Antifa and also that police at the time thought James Fields was simply "scared. "

Perhaps she was told such tweets would be career-ending or maybe she figured that out on her own. She deleted them and joined the winning team.

The rest is history. Lorenz has made a career doxing random people, notably Pamela Geller's daughters.

This also explains why Regime "journalists" -- make that Journofa -- seem to hate Ngo so much. Ngo provides many examples of independent journalists like himself recording and livestreaming footage that provide "the up-close, raw, and uncensored look into Antifa's extremism." Such raw footage strips Regime Media reporters of the ability to craft the Narrative.

Ngo writes that Antifa "have made it a priority to keep out journalists like myself, even releasing manuals on how to obstruct to the work of unapproved press." However, the critical point is what he says next:

"[T]hey've [Antifa] made key allies in the media to counter negative coverage, amplify their propaganda messaging, and discredit their shared opponents. The American public has been inundated with n onstop propaganda that obfuscates and lies about Antifa , simultaneously presenting them as anti-fascists righting racism, and a figment of the right's imagination ." [Emphases added]

Thus Ngo accuses corporate journalists, quite rightly, of knowingly spreading propaganda or being "actually members of the militant Antifa movement."

Ngo's guide on how to "identify Antifa press" is important. If you see a reporter freely videoing protests without being attacked, "that is a good sign the journalist produces Antifa-approved content."

But I must take issue with Ngo's conclusion that the "movement is made of organized networks of anarchist-communists who have the goal, training, and determination to overthrow the US government." Is that what Antifa actually fights for in the real world?

For example, CHAZ didn't end with a heroic last stand. It ended after bored city workers scattered some riffraff without much effort. It existed as long as Left-wing city politicians defended it against then-President Donald Trump. It vanished the moment that city authorities decided to regain control.

Insofar as Antifa have a real impact, it's not in organizing rent strikes or fighting banks. Instead, they are most effective when calling up oligarchs to get working-class people fired. Is such a group really a threat to the US government or something of a partner?

Last week, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security held a hearing on domestic terrorism. Andy Ngo was one of the witnesses [ Republican witness hits media coverage of Antifa and far-left violence at domestic terrorism hearing , by Zachary Halachak, Washington Examiner, February 24, 2021]. However, the main focus of the hearing was "white supremacy and right-wing extremism," at least according to Rep. Val Demings [ Domestic Terror Still Thorny Issue for Lawmakers After Capitol Attack , by Brandi Buchman, Courthouse News Service, February 24, 2021]. The World Socialist Web Site sneered that Ngo "served as a sounding board for all the lies and libels against hundreds of thousands of youth and workers of all races and ethnicities who marched peacefully in response to last May's police murder of George Floyd" [ Republicans use hearing on domestic terrorism to defend Trump and promote far-right forces , by Jacob Crosse, WSWS, February 24, 2021].

Ngo himself tweeted that Democrats "rebuffed" him.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1364808781327122433&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.unz.com%2Farticle%2Fandy-ngos-unmasked-antifa-not-anarcho-communism-but-anarcho-tyranny%2F&theme=light&widgetsVersion=e1ffbdb%3A1614796141937&width=500px

The Democrats showed no interest in his testimony seriously nor did the Main Stream Media. It simply vanished into the ether of non-news like the massive increase in homicides around the country. [ WATCH: Andy Ngo testifies to Congress on the rise of domestic terrorism in America , The Post Millennial, February 24, 2021]

As Ngo himself points out early in his book, the United States government is tremendously powerful. Anarcho-communists hardly seem a credible threat to its legitimacy. Rather than wanting to crush them, at least some Democrats favor what Antifa are doing -- and certainly want to downplay it.

Thus the presumptive next Attorney General, Merrick Garland, blithely dismissed an attack on a federal courthouse because it happened at night. If anything, the new administration seems determined to put the power of the state behind these "anarcho-communists."

And rather than trying to create a Workers' Paradise, what Antifa actually do is make the world safe for Woke Capital .

While Antifa violence is real, the danger to ordinary people is not so much that some rampaging mob will come into their house at four in the morning. The danger is that Antifa will see a Politically Incorrect tweet and render a person unemployable, with an assist from "journalist" allies.

Ngo's book is essential reading. However, he may not fully understand the threat. The problem isn't that Antifa is trying to overthrow the state. The problem is that the state and Antifa are working together against ordinary Americans.

What we're living under is something far worse than Antifa's imagined " anarcho-communism ." It's what the late Sam Francis presciently called anarcho-tyranny , with the worst features of lawlessness and autocracy combined.

This is why our situation is not as bad as Ngo suggests. It's far, far worse.

James Kirkpatrick [ Email him |Tweet him @VDAREJamesK ] is a Beltway veteran and a refugee from Conservatism Inc. His latest book is Conservatism Inc.: The Battle for the American Right . Read VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow 's Preface here .

[Mar 05, 2021] Brave buys a search engine, promises no tracking, no profiling and may even offer a paid-for, no-ad version The Register

Mar 05, 2021 | www.theregister.com

Brave buys a search engine, promises no tracking, no profiling – and may even offer a paid-for, no-ad version Pitches pro-privacy platform with customizable results filter dubbed Goggles Thomas Claburn in San Francisco Wed 3 Mar 2021 // 14:00 UTC SHARE


Brave, maker of the identically named privacy-focused web browser, has acquired its own search engine to offer as an alternative to Google Search and competing search engines that exist but aren't all that visible in Google's shadow.

On Wednesday, the company plans to announce that it's taking over Tailcat, a search engine developed by Cliqz, another privacy-focused browser biz that aspired to compete with Google and shut down last year . The deal, terms undisclosed, makes Cliqz owner Hubert Burda Media a Brave shareholder.

Brave intends to make Tailcat the foundation of its own search service, Brave Search . The company hopes that its more than 25 million monthly active Brave customers will, after an initial period of testing and courtship, choose to make Brave Search their default search engine and will use it alongside other parts of its privacy-oriented portfolio, which also includes Brave Ads, news reader Brave Today, Brave Firewall+VPN, and video conferencing system Brave Together.

Brave Search, the company insists, will respect people's privacy by not tracking or profiling those using the service. And it may even offer a way to end the debate about search engine bias by turning search result output over to a community-run filtering system called Goggles.

The service will, eventually, be available as a paid option – for those who want to pay for search results without ads – though its more common incarnation is likely to be ad-supported, in conjunction with Brave Ads. The latter offers participants the option to receive 70 per cent of the payment made by the advertiser in a cryptocurrency called BAT (Brave Attention Token).

Eich lays out his vision

In an interview with The Register , Brendan Eich, CEO of Brave, argued that the demand for privacy is real and cannot be ignored. "I think the genie doesn't go back in the bottle," he said. "Consciousness doesn't revert."

People used to hear about credit card breaches at large retailers like Target, Eich said, and think that privacy is hopeless but not something that necessarily affects them directly. But then it became more personal as technologies like ad retargeting did things like spoiling surprise gifts by showing the ad for the purchased item again to the intended recipient.

I think privacy is here to stay and now the question is how people do it and market it effectively

Eich sees the dominance of US tech companies contributing to the interest in privacy and making it a matter of concern for regulators around the world.

"It's not political in the broken US sense – which is kind of a Punch and Judy show – it's more like there are people of various commitments on all sides of politics who are aware not only of privacy being violated over time by the big tech players but of the big tech players being abusive monopolies," he said.

Pointing to how many companies now make privacy claims, Eich said, "I think privacy is here to stay and now the question is how people do it and market it effectively. If you don't market it, you can lose to somebody who just puts privacy perfume on a pig and tells you it smells great and tastes delicious."

Eich's pitch is not that Brave Search aims to take on Google Search directly. He acknowledges that there's no way to match Google's vast index and ability to return relevant results for obscure (long tail) search terms. Rather, he sees an opportunity to improve specific types of search queries, referred to as vertical markets.

"Part of what we're trying to do here is innovate in the area where there's now monopoly," he said in reference to Google Search, which has a market share of something like 92 per cent ."...The innovation through verticals is possible because it avoids having to take on Google's supreme competence, which is the rare or unique queries the long tail."

p2p Brave bets on the decentralized web with IPFS browser support for a more peer-to-peer approach READ MORE

"What we're trying to do is different, it's not based on crawling the web," Eich explained. "...Trying to crawl the whole web, it's not going to work. What Cliqz worked on..that's an anonymous query log aggregator, and a partial click log aggregator, to see when you don't convert on the search ad you leave the results page and you find the better results through some number of clicks."

Gathering that sort of query and click data requires consent, said Eich, and Brave isn't going to force Brave users to participate. But Cliqz started working on this and has a data set they called "the Human Web," and that's now the basis of Brave Search.

"The queries and the clicks matter but they are unlinkable," he said. "There has to be a property called record unlinkability. There's no IP address that gets dropped at the edge. Timing channels are blinded by adding some delays. And there's no way to say this query was from the same user as that query."

Brave Search's index there will be informed the activities of participating Brave users, in terms of the URLs they search for or click on, and adjacent web resources that don't require extensive crawling.

There's a theoretical risk users could poison the index through repeated visits to irrelevant or harmful web pages, knowing their activities would inform the index, but Eich suggests Brave is big and savvy enough to avoid being trolled in this way.

Brave also envisions users taking a more active role in their search results through a filtering mechanism.

"It allows different groups to run their own sort of Turing incomplete filter rules, sort of like ad blocking rules in the search service and not in the browser, to have a community moderated view of the global index," he explained. "It's called 'Goggles.'"

Eich observed with a chuckle that it isn't related to Google Goggles, an image recognition app that Google maintained from 2009 through 2018 until the arrival of Google Lens.

Shared search

The Brave Search team has written a paper [ PDF ] explaining its use of the term, titled "GOGGLES: Democracy dies in darkness, and so does the Web." The browser upstart aims to replace the tyranny of Google's inscrutable, authoritative index with a multiverse of indices defined by anyone with the inclination to do so.

Brave's vision of search is based on "an open and collaborative system by which a community, or a single user, can create sets of rules and filters, called Goggles, to define the space which a search engine can pull results from," the paper explains.

"Instead of a single ranking algorithm, we could have as many as needed, overcoming the biases that a single actor (the search engine) embeds into the results."

Goggles has its own Domain Specific Language (DSL) for writing search result filters. Brave hopes that Goggles will be adopted not only internally but among others search engines, too.

Brave Search users will be able to, for better or worse, see the world through filters they agree with or filters they detest. The point is it will be up to them rather than a large ad company located in Silicon Valley.

The Brave Search team acknowledges that not all filters will show results that are agreeable to everyone. "There will be Goggles created by creationists, anti-vaccination supporters or flat-earthers," the paper says. "However, the biases will be explicit, and therefore, the choice is a conscious one."

The paper contends that censorship will be unnecessary since illegal content should be caught by the host search engine and removed from the search index so no Goggle can see it in the first place.

"Brave is bringing back the idea of a user-first thick client, or a muscular client," said Eich, differentiating his browser from just being "a blind servant of ad tech that runs all the JavaScript Google throws at it." ®

[Mar 03, 2021] The Tycoon Plot by Israel Shamir

Mar 03, 2021 | www.unz.com

A classic villain of 1970s and 80s was the evil tycoon. James Bond took on some of them. Meet Hugo Drax of the Moonraker , or Karl Stromberg of The Spy Who Loved Me ; these guys were willing to destroy mankind to replace it with a better version. Stromberg planned to trigger a global nuclear war and survive it underwater. Drax intended to poison mankind with his deadly gas and repopulate the world with his new chosen ones. Another one was de Wynter, the super-villain of The Avengers, played by Sean Connery. He controlled the world weather, and could kill us all off by hurricanes and tsunamis.

Before the tycoons, when the Cold war raged, a villain was a KGB agent or a Chinese operative. As détente calmed relations between the blocks, the agents went out of fashion; later, the fantastic villains of Marvel came into a vogue. The evil tycoons were uncomfortably close to the real thing; and they moved from the cinematic world into our reality.

The world we live in is the world formed by evil tycoons. They are the modern Demiurges, the evil creators of the Gnostics, an early sect that confronted the Church. Like the Demiurges, they are practically omnipotent; stronger than the State. The government needs lot of permissions and authorisations to spend a penny. If a penny had been misspent, the dark word 'corruption' will sound. 'Corruption' is a silly concept; by applying it, the oligarchs eliminated state competition, for they can pay whatever they want to whomever they wish. The State must observe intricate arcane rules, while the tycoons have no such limits. As a result, they shape our minds and lives, making the State a poor legitimate king among powerful and wealthy barons.

The Corona crisis is a result of their activity. Now, a group of WHO scientists completed its four weeks inspection tour of Wuhan trying to find out how the virus found its way to humans; some of them think (as President Trump did) the virus escaped the Wuhan Lab. Matt Ridley of The Daily Telegraph concluded his piece analysing their findings: "A growing number of top experts [he provides the list] say that a lab leak remains a plausible scientific hypothesis to be investigated". It is rather unlikely, said the WHO , but other explanations (pangolins etc) also border on the improbable . The Chinese are understandably upset. Hua Chunying, the spokeswoman for the Foreign Affairs ministry (the Chinese counterpart for the State Department's Ned Price) rejected the idea saying, "The United States should open the biological lab at Fort Detrick, and invite WHO experts to conduct origin-tracing in the United States". The Guardian report said she promoted "a conspiracy theory that it came from a US army lab"; while Ms Hua accused the US of spreading "conspiracy theories and lies" tracing the source to Wuhan. Whatever we say is a fact-based result of diligent research; whatever you say is a conspiracy theory – both the US and China representatives subscribe to this mantra.

Our own Ron Unz made an excellent analysis of these accusations and counter-accusations in his April 2020 piece . He noted that the virus attack in Wuhan took place at the worst possible time and place for the Chinese; therefore, an incidental release (or intentional release by the Chinese) is extremely unlikely. Ron Unz suggested that it was an American biowarfare attack upon China. Didn't American people suffer from the disease? Yes, the US government is "grotesquely and manifestly incompetent " and they were likely to expect "a massive coronavirus outbreak in China would never spread back to America".

Perhaps, but a better explanation is that some evil tycoon(s) played the part of Karl Stromberg who intended to nuke both Moscow and New York causing war and world-wide devastation, as in the James Bond movie. It could be somebody like Bill Gates, who is a major investor in Wuhan Lab. A fact-checking site with its weasel language admitted that the Lab "has received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but Bill Gates can hardly be called a "partner" in the laboratory." Sure, not a partner. Just an investor, and that is more important than a partner. And he is not the only one; other multi-billionaires also are involved in bioresearch, in vaccine manufacturing, in Big Pharma. "Glaxo, BlackRock, and Bill Gates are all partners, but not owners of Pfizer", says another fact-checker . "In 2015, Anthony Fauci did issue a USD 3.7 million grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but not to "create the coronavirus" – the fact-checking site adds. Well, you could not possibly expect Fauci to word the grant in such a straightforward way, could you?

Perhaps it is too formidable a job even for an evil tycoon like Gates. A plot of several evil tycoons is more likely. Together, they could try to change the world and mankind to suit them.

The evil tycoons could poison China on their New Year holiday and take this uppity state down a ring or two. They could import the virus into the US to undermine and remove Trump whom they hated. (He was certain to win the elections but for Corona.) They could poison Europe to weaken it and make it more docile and obedient to their demands – and to buy their assets on the cheap. Corona and lockdown did not harm them for they are normally withdrawn from the bustle of the common man's life.

The billionaires control the media; that much we know, and the part media has played in the Corona crisis was enormous. The media coverage of the crisis has a huge hidden cost. Try to publish information you consider important on the front page of a newspaper. It will cost you a lot. Still, all newspapers belonging to the Billionaires' Media block beginning with the New York Times and ending with Haaretz gave at least a third of its front page to Corona news each day. The sheer cost of this advertising runs into billions. Will we ever know who paid for it?

Steven Soderbergh's (2011) film Contagion predicted many features of the Covid-19, notably the origin of the virus. In the film, the disease originates from bats in China and is spread through markets where contaminated pork meat is sold. How could Soderbergh (or his script writer Scott Z. Burns) possibly know eight years before the event that the contagion should originate in the Chinese bats? Who told him? Wouldn't you expect he knew something? Burns was instructed by WHO experts, the CNN site explains. Isn't it interesting that the same Bill Gates is a major donor of WHO? Is it entirely impossible that already in 2011 Gates' people began to leak some details of the future virus through their own WHO to Hollywood?

The tycoons could force a weak state to follow their instructions. Scientists do obey orders: otherwise, no grants, no positions. In April 2020, the German scientists were ordered , "to instill the fear of Corona". And they did it, as we learned this week, producing numbers of dead on demand.

It seems that tycoons gained most from the Corona Crisis. Their assets grew by trillions, while the assets of the middle classes decreased by the same amount. More importantly, all states suffered from the crisis; they took loans and credit, they were responsible for their citizens' health, while billionaires just had fun and enjoyed it. For this reason, I tend to dismiss the case against states, be it the US or China, while (some) billionaires appear the only possible villains.

These billionaires are able to influence people much better that the state. Consider Pierre Omidyar. Besides being the owner of eBay, he is the force behind hundreds of NGOs. His organisations form the 'progressive' agenda and train the foot soldiers of the Green Deal. Roslyn Fuller of Spiked-online checked the plethora of NGOs he employs.

She says his NGOs and charities are "engaged in 'social engineering' – that is, using their resources to artificially change the structure of society to how they think it should be. If successful this would amount to an extreme circumvention of democracy, utilising money not just to win elections, but to substitute paid or subsidised content for actual support, and thereby flip an entire political culture on to a different track by amplifying some voices and drowning out others."

He is just one of the Masters of Discourse, next to the infamous George Soros. Facebook, Google, Twitter and Amazon are even more powerful. The billionaires have immense clout and they decide what we can and can't say and write. Just last week Amazon banned my Cabbala of Power , a book that was sold by them for some ten years. The estimable The Unz Review is banned on Facebook and shadow-banned on Google. Twitter switched-off President Trump, showing who is the real boss of the United States. Probably almost all movements described as 'leftists' nowadays are engineered by the tycoons like Omidyar or Soros. True left had been left for dead on the battlefield of ideas.

The tycoons are directly involved in the Corona Crisis, because its results are good for them. And it means they have us where they want to have us, and they won't let us out. We are cancelled until we regain the government and cancel them.

SAGE, as British Corona management team rather presumptuously named itself (it included the ridiculous figure of Neil Ferguson, he of the millions of predicted deaths), already declared that lockdowns will be a part of British life for years to come, vaccine or no vaccine. The Guardian , the Voice of the Oligarchs, gently pooh-poohed them, for it is not good to declare what must happen right away. Let people have some hope, so they run to vaccinate themselves, and then only afterwards can we reveal that, sorry, it does not help, you still have to don a mask and observe social distance and, yes, suffer lockdowns. "It's much easier to follow the rules if we think of them as temporary."

The plotters' plans aren't secret; they were described by Klaus Schwab in his book The Great Reset . Schwab is not a great thinker, being merely a weak scientist with just a few publications, and not a good or even decent writer. He had to collaborate with a journalist Thierry Malleret to produce the book. He is just a voice for the tycoons. But the question is, will he/they get what they want?

[Mar 01, 2021] Withdrawing troops from Afghanistan may not be what Talibal wants

Nov 12, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
jinn , Nov 12 2020 23:34 utc | 81

The Afghans (including the Taliban) do not want the US to leave their country. The flow of US$ into the country (including the flow of heroin$) is what the Afghans have lived on for many decades. Its not like the Afghans don't have control of their own country. They have complete control of all the parts of the country that they want to control. They are perfectly happy to allow Americans to control small parts of the country as long as the $$$ keep flowing into the whole country.

The US power elite may have figured out that just like every other power that has ever tried to occupy Afghanistan that it is a black hole that sucks the life out of the power trying to conq


Haassaan , Nov 13 2020 0:16 utc | 86

@76 Tom
Interesting! Been too busy for reviewing the new military appointees until I read your post. It looks like this is a last ditch attempt by Trump to get troops out of Afghanistan and Syria...

Tom , Nov 13 2020 0:20 utc | 87

"withdrawing troops from Afghanistan may well be exactly what TPTB want."

Posted by: jinn | Nov 12 2020 23:34 utc | 81

Well, they have had, what 19 years years to do that and now that President Trump makes another push for it, all hell breaks loose from the forever war team, you know that team of Democrats and RINO's who are now vying for a spot on Biden's team of psychopaths for war. The we came, we saw and aren't leaving team.

Haassaan , Nov 13 2020 0:32 utc | 89

@81 Jinn

"withdrawing troops from Afghanistan may well be exactly what TPTB want."

Anything is possible, but given the pushback that is taking place (quietly of course, lest the masses get awoken) that is seriously doubtful.

Afghanistan can be likened to one of the central squares on a chessboard...control of central squares is vital as it reduces the mobility of your opponent and lays ground for offensive action.

China has a border with Afghanistan, as does Iran...were Afghanistan to free itself from USA occupation, it would make a great conduit for the BRI.

That is without getting into Afghanistan's role in opium trade and the related black budget, nor its wealth in rare minerals. One might say for the Hegemon to remain the Hegemon it needs to control Afghanistan.

The problem for the hegemon is Afghanistan is expensive to hold on to...and this is without Russia, Iran or China putting any effort in to chase US troops out via arming and training proxies...that could be done quickly, and I am guessing the groundwork is already in place.

jinn , Nov 13 2020 0:46 utc | 91

Well, they have had, what 19 years years to do that
_________________________________________

Well sure but you need to remember the story of why we were there in the first place.
They can't just dump all the BS that they have been feeding us for nineteen years and say "never mind" like Roseanne Roseannadanna.

As for the warmongers who support attacking Libya, Iraq, Syria, etc that was done to send a message to any country that does not want to knuckle under to the $$$ hegemony and thinks about trying to escape it.
That messaging does not apply to the Afghan war. That war sends the exact opposite message.

[Feb 25, 2021] The question of terminology

Feb 25, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

steven t johnson , Feb 24 2021 18:11 utc | 16

There is no such thing as "liberal-fascist." "Liberal" has never meant any sort of quasi-anarchist commitment to untrammeled individual rights. It has always meant the freedom of the press. The thing is, the real meaning of freedom of the press for the liberal is the freedom of the owners of the press to do what they want. The fact that customarily a free-for-the-owners'-press happen to produce the right kind of news suitable for owners and the advertisers is seen as the benefit of a free press. As for "fascist," no concept of fascism that doesn't include legal and illegal restrictions on freedom and government propaganda mobilizing the citizens to sacrifice for recovery from defeat/further conquest is not a serious concept of fascism at all. Both liberalism and fascism revere property but will compromise for necessity, liberalism for a certain degree of class peace, fascism for war, but if anybody is determined to indoctrinate the masses it is fascism. The implicit notion here that people daring to think or worse, live, differently than tradition may inspire rage in mad dog reactionaries. But this is at bottom the same rage that led Catholics and Protestants to murder each other or for witches to be killed by the thousands (yes, they were,) or for monarchists to kill republicans or for one ethnic/religious/national group to murder another. Modern society is not a genuine offense, no matter how bigoted you are. The keyboard has a hyphen but hitting it between "liberal" and "fascist" is just more crypto-fascist BS. It doesn't matter how many times you type it, it's not a thing.

Mao Cheng Ji , Feb 24 2021 18:14 utc | 17

@Saraj 9, "Very difficult, see https..."

It seems to me, they make it sound more difficult than it really is.

Think of thepiratebay. It gets banned, blocked, raided, sued - from 2006 at least - and yet it lives. It changes from .org to .whatever, it finds registrars and infrastructure somehow.

And you don't really need google/apple store all that much: a browser will suffice.

And search? paypal, bank - what is this all about? I'm sure thepiratebay works with advertisers somehow (definitely with VPN companies), and somehow it gets paid. And that's all there is to it. Imo.

Mao Cheng Ji , Feb 24 2021 18:23 utc | 18
Dear steven, when fascists call themselves 'liberal', it makes sense (to me) to identify them as 'liberal-fascist'.

And that's all there is to it.

You are free to classify and identify them any way you like. May I suggest, as an alternative, 'woke-fascist'?

S , Feb 25 2021 1:39 utc | 58

The term liberal-fascist refers to people who consider themselves liberals, but in reality are not; in fact, these people resemble fascists more and more with each passing day. A more precise term would be "liberal"-fascist (with the quotes). It's not so much about SJW witchhunts as about absolute faith in everything the state says and hysterical demands to censor any dissenting opinion.

S , Feb 25 2021 2:13 utc | 62

I guess, one can use fake liberal proto-fascist to avoid the wrath of nitpickers.

Piotr Berman , Feb 25 2021 3:14 utc | 64

...In short, anywhere it deems convenient, liberals support fascists, cannibals and other charming characters. As it goes for a while, liberals acquire fascistic values and try them in their home countries. Show trials and corporate censorship for now.

ak74 , Feb 25 2021 4:32 utc | 65

Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.

Do not amplify narratives that are aligned with the Russian government.

Do not undermine faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.

Everyone got that now?

Alan MacLeod actually tweeted about this:

"This is not a joke. Twitter has deleted dozens of account for the crime of 'undermining faith in the NATO alliance.'"

https://twitter.com/AlanRMacLeod/status/1364548110521876480

Undermining faith in the North American Terrorist Organization (NATO) is a Thought Crime of the highest order!

The punishment for this crime is being forced to watch a conga line of Anglo-American media mouthpieces blather about whatever is their Moral Outrage of the Month--Clockwork Orange style.

Welcome to the United States of Oceania.

MFB , Feb 25 2021 7:26 utc | 74

..I suspect that the term "liberal-fascist" derives partly from the term Islamofascist, meaning a Muslim who does not bow to Washington six times a day, and partly from the term "social-fascist", a Stalinist term for a socialist who did not bow to Moscow six times a day.

MFB , Feb 25 2021 7:26 utc | 74

Apropos neoliberalism.

The liberalism which is referred to here is the economic liberalism which was adopted in the United Kingdom in the 1840s after the "reform" of the Corn Laws, which permitted free trade in grain and therefore brought down both the price of wheat and the small farming community in the UK, as it was intended to do. Later these liberal policies (largely modelled on the "comparative advantage" economic theory, which had already been refuted by the time it was developed by David Ricardo) were used to justify the Irish genocide of 1847-9.

This policy was eventually abandoned later in the nineteenth century, except for places like India, of course. It was restored in the West in the 1970s, under the name of "free trade", and therefore is called neoliberalism, or new liberalism in the economic sense.

The term is not a compliment.

I suspect that the term "liberal-fascist" derives partly from the term Islamofascist, meaning a Muslim who does not bow to Washington six times a day, and partly from the term "social-fascist", a Stalinist term for a socialist who did not bow to Moscow six times a day.

Dogon Priest , Feb 25 2021 13:15 utc | 91

Some animals are more equal than others

[Feb 21, 2021] https://apnews.com/article/7f6ed0b1bda047339f22789a10f64ac4

Feb 21, 2021 | apnews.com

Andrea Iravani

[Feb 10, 2021] Neoliberalism is similar to a deracinated nazism, a comfortableness with exterminatory exploitation so long as it's exercised though debt contracts, that has persisted to this day in Western finance, where debt is absolute but lives are fungible.

Notable quotes:
"... Slobodan's "The Globalists" is a great look at Von Mises and Hayek peddling NeoLiberalism to the last hereditary aristocracy standing in Europe in the interwar years. ..."
"... To my mind, this set up a deracinated pseudo-nazism ..."
Feb 10, 2021 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

PlutoniumKun , February 6, 2021 at 11:25 am

The thing is, the UK has long been captured by neoliberalism (arguably, they invented it). The UK was the Trojan horse for the worst forms of neoliberalism in the EU. Which is why I thought it was ideal for neoliberals wherever they were based for the UK to be in the EU. I think one problem is that the UK somehow regressed from neoliberalism to a dream of some form of old style 19th Century liberalism.

Patrick , February 6, 2021 at 2:46 pm

My reading attributes the term (aside from an obscure French usage) and the ideology to Friedman and Austrian ex-pats Hayek and von MIses. When I think UK in the context of neoliberalsim, naturally I think Thatcher. So yes, at least since Thatcher neoliberalism has been the prevailing wind in the UK for which – imho – Brexit is both a symptom and a solidifier.

jsn , February 6, 2021 at 5:03 pm

Slobodan's "The Globalists" is a great look at Von Mises and Hayek peddling NeoLiberalism to to the last hereditary aristocracy standing in Europe in the interwar years.

The Charlatan and Saint of NeoLiberalism didn't really get traction until the US set up the BIS to help the Germans keep the debt cycle of dependence from the Versailles treaty liquid, with German payments through France and the UK back to the US.

To my mind, this set up a deracinated pseudo-nazism, a comfortableness with exterminatory exploitation so long as it's exercised though debt contracts, that has persisted to this day in Western finance, where debt is absolute but lives are fungible.

Michaelmas , February 6, 2021 at 10:42 pm

Slobodan's "The Globalists" is a great look at Von Mises and Hayek peddling NeoLiberalism to the last hereditary aristocracy standing in Europe in the interwar years.

It's Slobodian, Quinn.

To my mind, this set up a deracinated pseudo-nazism

So you're on to something.

Hayek is the Grandfather of neoliberalism and the primary influence on Hayek's thought was the Vienna of his youth: the go-go years after Franz Josef surrendered to the Hungarians, created the dual monarchy, and there was the great cultural efflorescence of Vienna that preceded the Austro-Hungarian empire's collapse.

Two ideologies emerged after WWI from Austria in reaction to the traumatic experience of that collapse -- ideologies formulated by Austrians that then deeply damaged the rest of the world.

Neoliberalism was one, of course. The other? Well, someone once asked Ernst Hanfstaengl aka Putzi, Hitler's confidant, what caused Hitler's antiSemitism.

Hanfstaengl replied: 'Anyone who did not know Vienna before 1914 cannot understand.' Hanfstaengl then explained that before WWI Vienna was full of beautiful people, the soldiers in their uniforms, the Hapsburg Empire's citizens in their local traditional clothes etc and 'then these strange people came from the East all dressed in black and speaking a strange kind of German'. These were the Orthodox Jews who came from Silesia, a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Kaiser Franz Josef had done much to emancipate and help the Jews, so many crossed over to Vienna to start a new life.

Now, to further put Hitler and Nazism's policies in their historical context, it's necessary to understand the situation in Germany prior to their appearance.

In 1871, Bismarck had nationalized healthcare, making it available to all Germans, then provided old-age pensions as public social security. Child labor was abolished and public schools were provided for all children. The Kaiser implemented worker protection laws in 1890. After WW I, the Social Democrats' influence had remained strong. Germany had an active union membership. An official "Decree on Collective Agreements, Worker and Employees Committees and the Settlement of Labor disputes" enabled collective bargaining, legal enforcement of labor contracts as well as social security for disabled veterans, widows, and dependents. In 1918, unemployment benefits were given to all German workers.

In the 1932 elections, the Nazi Party didn't have an outright majority. According to the Nuremberg Trial transcripts, on January 4, 1933, German bankers and industrialists had a secret backroom deal with then-Chancellor Von Papen to make Hitler the Chancellor of Germany in a coalition.

https://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/pdf/NT_war-criminals_Vol-VIII.pdf

According to banker Kurt Baron von Schröder:

"In February 1933, as Chancellor, Hitler met with the leading German industrialists at the home of Hermann Goring. There were representatives from IG Farben, AG Siemens, BMW, coal mining magnates, Theissen Corp, AG Krupp, and others bankers, investors, and other Germans belonging to the top 1%. In this meeting, Hitler said, "Private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy.'"

In 1934 the Nazis outlined their plan to revitalize the German economy with the reprivatization of significant industries: railways, public works project, construction, steel, and banking. Hitler guaranteed profits for the private sector; many American industrialists and bankers flocked to Germany to invest.

The Nazis had a thorough plan for deregulation. The Nazi's chief economist stated," The first thing German business needs is peace and quiet. It must have a feeling of absolute legal security and must know that work and its return are guaranteed." Likewise, businesses weren't to be hampered by too much "regulation." On May 2, 1933, Hitler sent his Brown Shirts to all union headquarters. Union leaders were beaten, and sent to prison or concentration camps. The Nazi party expropriated union funds -- money workers paid for union membership -- for itself.

On January 20, 1934, the Nazis passed the Law Regulating National Labor, abrogating the power of the government to set minimum wages and working conditions. Employers lowered wages and benefits. Workers were banned from striking or engaging in other collective bargaining rights, and worked longer hours for lower wages. Their conditions so deteriorated that when the head of the AFL visited Nazi Germany in 1938, he compared an average worker's life to that of a slave. .

The Nazis also privatized medicine. One of Hitler's economists was the head of a private insurance company. These private for-profit health insurance companies immediately started to profit from Anti-Semitism. In 1934, they eliminated reimbursements for Jewish physicians, which allowed them to profit further.

And so on.

Philip K. Dick once wrote a novel whose particular ontological riff was that the Roman empire never really ended and in the 20th century people lived in an imposed illusion under the same elite, or their heirs, that had headed the Roman empire.

That sort of science-fictional novel could be written based on our own reality, riffing on the theme: The Nazis won.

[Feb 10, 2021] The (New Normal) War on Domestic Terror by C.J. Hopkins

Feb 10, 2021 | www.unz.com

C.J. HOPKINS FEBRUARY 8, 2021 1,500 WORDS 139 COMMENTS REPLY Tweet Reddit Share Share Email Print More RSS

If you enjoyed the Global War on Terror, you're going to love the new War on Domestic Terror! It's just like the original Global War on Terror, except that this time the "Terrorists" are all "Domestic Violent Extremists" ("DVEs"), "Homegrown Violent Extremists" ("HVEs"), "Violent Conspiracy-Theorist Extremists" ("VCTEs"), "Violent Reality Denialist Extremists" (VRDEs"), "Insurrectionary Micro-Aggressionist Extremists" ("IMAEs"), "People Who Make Liberals Feel Uncomfortable" ("PWMLFUs"), and anyone else the Department of Homeland Security wants to label an "extremist" and slap a ridiculous acronym on.

According to a " National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin " issued by the DHS on January 27, these DCEs, HVEs, VCTEs, VRDEs, IMAEs, and PWMLFUs are "ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority" and other "perceived grievances fueled by false narratives." They are believed to be "motivated by a range of issues, including anger over Covid-19 restrictions, the 2020 election results, police use of force," and other dangerous "false narratives" (e.g., the existence of the "deep state," "herd immunity," "biological sex," "God," and so on).

"Inspired by foreign terrorist groups" and "emboldened by the breach of the US Capitol Building," this diabolical network of "domestic terrorists" is "plotting attacks against government facilities," "threatening violence against critical infrastructure" and actively "citing misinformation and conspiracy theories about Covid-19." For all we know, they might be huddled in the "Wolf's Lair" at Mar-a-Lago right now, plotting a devastating terrorist attack with those WMDs we never found in Iraq, or generating population-adjusted death-rate charts going back 20 years , or posting pictures of " extremist frogs " on the Internet.

The Department of Homeland Security is "concerned," as are its counterparts throughout the global capitalist empire. The (New Normal) War on Domestic Terror isn't just a war on American "domestic terror." The "domestic terror" threat is international. France has just passed a " Global Security Law " banning citizens from filming the police beating the living snot out of people (among other "anti-terrorist" provisions). In Germany, the government is preparing to install an anti-terror moat around the Reichstag . In the Netherlands, the police are cracking down on the VCTEs, VRDEs, and other " angry citizens who hate the system ," who have been protesting over nightly curfews. Suddenly, everywhere you look (or at least if you are looking in the corporate media), " global extremism networks are growing ." It's time for Globocap to take the gloves off again, root the "terrorists" out of their hidey holes, and roll out a new official narrative.

Actually, there's not much new about it. When you strip away all the silly new acronyms, the (New Normal) War on Domestic Terror is basically just a combination of the "War on Terror" narrative and the "New Normal" narrative, i.e., a militarization of the so-called "New Normal" and a pathologization of the "War on Terror." Why would GloboCap want to do that, you ask?

I think you know, but I'll go ahead and tell you.

See, the problem with the original "Global War on Terror" was that it wasn't actually all that global. It was basically just a war on Islamic "terrorism" (i.e., resistance to global capitalism and its post-ideological ideology), which was fine as long as GloboCap was just destabilizing and restructuring the Greater Middle East. It was put on hold in 2016 , so that GloboCap could focus on defeating "populism" (i.e., resistance to global capitalism and its post-ideological ideology), make an example of Donald Trump, and demonize everyone who voted for him (or just refused to take part in their free and fair elections ), which they have just finished doing, in spectacular fashion. So, now it's back to "War on Terror" business, except with a whole new cast of "terrorists," or, technically, an expanded cast of "terrorists." (I rattled off a list in my previous column .)

In short, GloboCap has simply expanded, recontextualized, and pathologized the "War on Terror" (i.e., the war on resistance to global capitalism and its post-ideological ideology). This was always inevitable, of course. A globally-hegemonic system (e.g., global capitalism) has no external enemies, as there is no territory "outside" the system. Its only enemies are within the system, and thus, by definition, are insurgents, also known as "terrorists" and "extremists." These terms are utterly meaningless, obviously. They are purely strategic, deployed against anyone who deviates from GloboCap's official ideology which, in case you were wondering, is called "normality" (or, in our case, currently, "New Normality").

In earlier times, these "terrorists" and "extremists" were known as "heretics," "apostates," and "blasphemers." Today, they are also known as "deniers," e.g., "science deniers," "Covid deniers," and recently, more disturbingly, "reality deniers." This is an essential part of the pathologization of the "War on Terror" narrative. The new breed of "terrorists" do not just hate us for our freedom they hate us because they hate "reality." They are no longer our political or ideological opponents they are suffering from a psychiatric disorder. They no longer need to be argued with or listened to they need to be "treated," "reeducated," and "deprogrammed," until they accept "Reality." If you think I'm exaggerating the totalitarian nature of the "New Normal/War on Terror" narrative, read this op-ed in The New York Times exploring the concept of a "Reality Czar" to deal with our "Reality Crisis."

And this is just the beginning, of course. The consensus (at least in GloboCap circles) is, the (New Normal) War on Domestic Terror will probably continue for the next 10 to 20 years , which should provide the global capitalist ruling classes with more than enough time to carry out the " Great Reset ," destroy what's left of human society, and condition the public to get used to living like cringing, neo-feudal peasants who have to ask permission to leave their houses. We're still in the initial " shock and awe " phase (which they will have to scale back a bit eventually), but just look at how much they've already accomplished.

The economic damage is literally incalculable millions have been plunged into desperate poverty, countless independent businesses crushed, whole industries crippled, developing countries rendered economically dependent (i.e., compliant) for the foreseeable future, as billionaires amassed over $1 trillion in wealth and supranational corporate behemoths consolidated their dominance across the planet.

And that's just the economic damage. The attack on society has been even more dramatic. GloboCap, in the space of a year, has transformed the majority of the global masses into an enormous, paranoid totalitarian cult that is no longer capable of even rudimentary reasoning. (I'm not going to go on about it here at this point, you either recognize it or you're in it.) They're actually lining up in parking lots, the double-masked members of this Covidian cult, to be injected with an experimental "vaccine" that they believe will save the human species from a virus that causes mild to moderate symptoms in roughly 95% of those "infected," and that over 99% of the "infected" survive .

So, it is no big surprise that these same mindless cultists are gung-ho for the (New Normal) War on Domestic Terror, and the upcoming globally-televised show trial of Donald Trump for "inciting insurrection," and the ongoing corporate censorship of the Internet, and can't wait to be issued their " Freedom Passports ," which will allow them to take part in "New Normal" life -- double-masked and socially-distanced, naturally -- while having their every movement and transaction, and every word they write on Facebook, or in an email, or say to someone on their smartphones, or in the vicinity of their 5G toasters, recorded by GloboCap's Intelligence Services and their corporate partners, subsidiaries, and assigns. These people have nothing at all to worry about, as they would never dream of disobeying orders, and could not produce an original thought, much less one displeasing to GloboCap, if you held a fake apocalyptic plague to their heads.

As for the rest of us "extremists," "domestic terrorists," "heretics," and "reality deniers," (i.e., anyone criticizing global capitalism, or challenging its official narratives, and its increasingly totalitarian ideology, regardless of our specific DHS acronyms), I wish I had something hopeful to tell you, but, the truth is, things aren't looking so good. I guess I'll see you in a quarantine camp , or in the psych ward, or an offshore detention facility or, I don't know, maybe I'll see you in the streets.

C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volumes I and II of his Consent Factory Essays are published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .

[Feb 10, 2021] Before the war the brothers arranged IP shares between the soon to be contending German and Anglo-sphere industries, during the war they tried to arrange a separate peace with post Hitler Germany, after Roosevelt's death and particularly in their con job on Truman, they made the CIA the collective tool of the transatlantic financial elite, David Rockefeller explicitly included.

Feb 10, 2021 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

jsn , February 6, 2021 at 12:31 pm

Reading Blacks biography of Roosevelt, Hudson's work, Talbot's "The Devil's Chessboard" and Douglas's "JFK and the Unspeakable" one discerns a clear line between the UK interwar Foreign Office, military intelligence and rentier class and the Dulles brother's post war ascent to the pinnacles of back room power.

Before the war the brothers arranged IP shares between the soon to be contending German and Anglo-sphere industries, during the war they tried to arrange a separate peace with post Hitler Germany, after Roosevelt's death and particularly in their con job on Truman, they made the CIA the collective tool of the transatlantic financial elite, David Rockefeller explicitly included.

These books all rely extensively on previously lightly touched primary sources.

[Feb 05, 2021] Former CIA Counterterror Chief Suggests Going To War Against -Domestic Insurgents

Feb 04, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

The former head of the CIA Counterterrorism Center has suggested that counterinsurgency tactics used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan should be applied to 'domestic extremists' inside the US.

NPR reports that Robert Grenier, who directed the CIA's Counterterrorism program from 2004 to 2006, declared "We may be witnessing the dawn of a sustained wave of violent insurgency within our own country, perpetrated by our own countrymen."

In an op-ed for The New York Times last week, Grenier suggested that "extremists who seek a social apocalypse are capable of producing endemic political violence of a sort not seen in this country since Reconstruction."

Grenier, also a former CIA station chief in Pakistan and Afghanistan, grouped together "the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, 'Christian' national chauvinists, white supremacists and QAnon fantasists" and claimed they are all "committed to violent extremism."

Grenier labeled dissenters an "insurgency" and called for them to be "defeated" like an enemy army.

In further comments to NPR, Grenier stated that "as in any insurgency situation, you have committed insurgents who are typically a relatively small proportion of the affected population. But what enables them to carry forward their program is a large number of people from whom they can draw tacit support."

Grenier also stated that insurgents may emerge from groups who "believe that the election was stolen," or those "who don't trust NPR or The New York Times ."

"The most violent elements that we are concerned about right now see former President Trump as a broadly popular and charismatic symbol," the CIA spook added, before comparing Trump to Saddam Hussein.

"You know, just as I saw in the Middle East that the air went out of violent demonstrations when [Iraqi leader] Saddam Hussein was defeated and seen to be defeated, I think the same situation applies here," he proclaimed.

Grenier suggested that Trump should be convicted at the upcoming impeachment trial as a 'national security imperative' because "So long as he is there and leading the resistance, if you will, which he shows every sign of intending to do, he is going to be an inspiration to very violent people."

Grenier then compared Americans to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, noting that in Afghanistan "the thrust of our campaign there was, yes, to hunt down al-Qaida, but primarily to remove the supportive environment in which they were able to live and to flourish. And that meant fighting the Taliban."

"I think that is the heart of what we need to deal with here," he added.

Listen:

https://www.npr.org/player/embed/963343896/963361404

Linking to Grenier's comments, journalist Glenn Greenwald quipped that wedding guests throughout America should watch out for drone missiles:

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1356976927068798978&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fcia-counterterror-chief-suggests-going-war-against-domestic-insurgents&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

The call to treat Americans as terrorist insurgents comes on the heels of a Department of Homeland Security warning that those dissatisfied with the election result may rise up and commit acts of terrorism in the coming weeks.

"Information suggests that some ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority and the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives, could continue to mobilize to incite or commit violence," stated the bulletin issued last week through the DHS National Terrorist Advisory System -- or NTAS.

The bulletin added that 'extremists' may be "motivated by a range of issues, including anger over COVID-19 restrictions, the 2020 election results, and police use of force."

[Feb 02, 2021] John le Carr - Wikipedia

Feb 02, 2021 | en.wikipedia.org

Politics [ edit ]

Le Carré feuded with Salman Rushdie over The Satanic Verses , stating that "nobody has a God-given right to insult a great religion and be published with impunity". [35]

In January 2003, two months prior to the invasion, The Times published le Carré's essay "The United States Has Gone Mad" criticising the buildup to the Iraq War and President George W. Bush 's response to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks , calling it "worse than McCarthyism , worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War " and "beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams". [36] [37] Le Carré participated in the London protests against the Iraq War . He said the war resulted from the "politicisation of intelligence to fit the political intentions" of governments and "How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history". [38] [39]

He was critical of Tony Blair 's role in taking Britain into the Iraq War, saying "I can't understand that Blair has an afterlife at all. It seems to me that any politician who takes his country to war under false pretences has committed the ultimate sin. I think that a war in which we refuse to accept the body count of those that we kill is also a war of which we should be ashamed". [38]

Le Carré was critical of Western governments' policies towards Iran. He believed Iran's actions are a response to being "encircled by nuclear powers" and by the way in which "we ousted Mosaddeq through the CIA and the Secret Service here across the way and installed the Shah and trained his ghastly secret police force in all the black arts, the SAVAK ". [38]

In 2017, le Carré expressed concerns over the future of liberal democracy , saying "I think of all things that were happening across Europe in the 1930s, in Spain, in Japan, obviously in Germany. To me, these are absolutely comparable signs of the rise of fascism and it's contagious, it's infectious. Fascism is up and running in Poland and Hungary. There's an encouragement about". [40] He later wrote that the end of the Cold War had left the West without a coherent ideology, in contrast to the "notion of individual freedom , of inclusiveness, of tolerance – all of that we called anti-communism " prevailing during that time. [41]

... ... ...

Le Carré was an outspoken advocate of European integration and sharply criticised Brexit . [45] Le Carré criticised Conservative politicians such as Boris Johnson (whom he referred to as a "mob orator"), Dominic Cummings , and Nigel Farage in interviews, claiming that their "task is to fire up the people with nostalgia [and] with anger". He further opined in interviews that "What really scares me about nostalgia is that it's become a political weapon. Politicians are creating a nostalgia for an England that never existed, and selling it, really, as something we could return to", noting that with "the demise of the working class we saw also the demise of an established social order, based on the stability of ancient class structures". [44] [46] On the other hand, he said that in the Labour Party "they have this Leninist element and they have this huge appetite to level society."

[Feb 02, 2021] Facebook and the Surveillance Society- The Other Coup - The New York Times

Notable quotes:
"... By 2013, the CIA's chief technology officer outlined the agency's mission "to collect everything and hang on to it forever," acknowledging the internet companies, including Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Fitbit and telecom companies, for making it possible. ..."
"... The revolutionary roots of surveillance capitalism are planted in this unwritten political doctrine of surveillance exceptionalism, bypassing democratic oversight, and essentially granting the new internet companies a license to steal human experience and render it as proprietary data. ..."
"... What's been reinvented is no less than the idea of people as property. ..."
"... As an internet executive who has been in the game from the very beginning (1995 and onward), I am still dumbfounded that the overwhelming majority of Google search users have no idea that when they search for a product or a store, for example, the results are not democratically revealed. Using fashion as an example, Google's business model has stores and brands bid on keyword search terms, like "fine lingerie," or "red pumps," or "blue silk robe," to name a few of the billions of search terms. ..."
"... surveillance economies of scale and AI insights of prediction that allow a herd animal, us, to be more profitably managed and the profit more efficiently extracted. ..."
"... Alexa, dim the lights! ... like the hundreds of millions of other herd animals living the same delusion. if we were paid for our data use, we would just become aware of its use. this is a defect in a system designed to make you feel unique and special. that's the kink: at bottom, you like being surveilled and controlled. ..."
Jan 29, 2021 | www.nytimes.com

We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.

By Shoshana Zuboff

Dr. Zuboff, a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, is the author of "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism."

Two decades ago, the American government left democracy's front door open to California's fledgling internet companies, a cozy fire lit in welcome. In the years that followed, a surveillance society flourished in those rooms, a social vision born in the distinct but reciprocal needs of public intelligence agencies and private internet companies, both spellbound by a dream of total information awareness. Twenty years later, the fire has jumped the screen, and on Jan. 6, it threatened to burn down democracy's house.

I have spent exactly 42 years studying the rise of the digital as an economic force driving our transformation into an information civilization. Over the last two decades, I've observed the consequences of this surprising political-economic fraternity as those young companies morphed into surveillance empires powered by global architectures of behavioral monitoring, analysis, targeting and prediction that I have called surveillance capitalism. On the strength of their surveillance capabilities and for the sake of their surveillance profits, the new empires engineered a fundamentally anti-democratic epistemic coup marked by unprecedented concentrations of knowledge about us and the unaccountable power that accrues to such knowledge.

In an information civilization, societies are defined by questions of knowledge -- how it is distributed, the authority that governs its distribution and the power that protects that authority. Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides who knows? Surveillance capitalists now hold the answers to each question, though we never elected them to govern. This is the essence of the epistemic coup. They claim the authority to decide who knows by asserting ownership rights over our personal information and defend that authority with the power to control critical information systems and infrastructures.

... ... ...

The second stage is marked by a sharp rise in epistemic inequality , defined as the difference between what I can know and what can be known about me...

The Surveillance Exception

The public tragedy of Sept. 11 dramatically shifted the focus in Washington from debates over federal privacy legislation to a mania for total information awareness, turning Silicon Valley's innovative surveillance practices into objects of intense interest. As Jack Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School, observed , the intelligence community would have to "rely on private enterprise to collect and generate information for it," in order to reach beyond constitutional, legal, or regulatory constraints, controversies that are central today.

By 2013, the CIA's chief technology officer outlined the agency's mission "to collect everything and hang on to it forever," acknowledging the internet companies, including Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Fitbit and telecom companies, for making it possible.

The revolutionary roots of surveillance capitalism are planted in this unwritten political doctrine of surveillance exceptionalism, bypassing democratic oversight, and essentially granting the new internet companies a license to steal human experience and render it as proprietary data.

Young entrepreneurs without any democratic mandate landed a windfall of infinite information and unaccountable power. Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, exercised absolute control over the production, organization and presentation of the world's information. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg has had absolute control over what would become a primary means of global communication and news consumption, along with all the information concealed in its networks. The group's membership grew, and a swelling population of global users proceeded unaware of what just happened.

The license to steal came with a price, binding the executives to the continued patronage of elected officials and regulators as well as the sustained ignorance, or at least learned resignation, of users. The doctrine was, after all, a political doctrine, and its defense would require a future of political maneuvering, appeasement, engagement and investment.

Google led the way with what would become one of the world's richest lobbying machines. In 2018 nearly half the Senate received contributions from Facebook, Google and Amazon, and the companies continue to set spending records .

Most significant, surveillance exceptionalism has meant that the United States and many other liberal democracies chose surveillance over democracy as the guiding principle of social order. With this forfeit, democratic governments crippled their ability to sustain the trust of their people, intensifying the rationale for surveillance.

The Economics and Politics of Epistemic Chaos

To understand the economics of epistemic chaos, it's important to know that surveillance capitalism's operations have no formal interest in facts. All data is welcomed as equivalent, though not all of it is equal. Extraction operations proceed with the discipline of the Cyclops, voraciously consuming everything it can see and radically indifferent to meaning, facts and truth.

ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story

In a leaked memo , a Facebook executive, Andrew Bosworth, describes this willful disregard for truth and meaning:

"We connect people. That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack. The ugly truth is anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good."

In other words, asking a surveillance extractor to reject content is like asking a coal-mining operation to discard containers of coal because it's too dirty. This is why content moderation is a last resort, a public-relations operation in the spirit of ExxonMobil's social responsibility messaging. In Facebook's case, data triage is undertaken either to minimize the risk of user withdrawal or to avoid political sanctions. Both aim to increase rather than diminish data flows. The extraction imperative combined with radical indifference to produce systems that ceaselessly escalate the scale of engagement but don't care what engages you.

I'm homing in now on Facebook not because it's the only perpetrator of epistemic chaos but because it's the largest social media company and its consequences reach farthest.

The economics of surveillance capitalism begot the extractive Cyclops, turning Facebook into an advertising juggernaut and a killing field for truth. Then an amoral Mr. Trump became president, demanding the right to lie at scale. Destructive economics merged with political appeasement, and everything became infinitely worse.

Key to this story is that the politics of appeasement required little more than a refusal to mitigate, modify or eliminate the ugly truth of surveillance economics. Surveillance capitalism's economic imperatives turned Facebook into a societal tinderbox. Mr. Zuckerberg merely had to stand down and commit himself to the bystander role.

Internal research presented in 2016 and 2017 demonstrated causal links between Facebook's algorithmic targeting mechanisms and epistemic chaos. One researcher concluded that the algorithms were responsible for the viral spread of divisive content that helped fuel the growth of German extremist groups. Recommendation tools accounted for 64 percent of "extremist group joins," she found -- dynamics not unique to Germany .

The Cambridge Analytica scandal in March 2018 riveted the world's attention on Facebook in a new way, offering a window for bold change. The public began to grasp that Facebook's political advertising business is a way to rent the company's suite of capabilities to microtarget users, manipulate them and sow epistemic chaos, pivoting the whole machine just a few degrees from commercial to political objectives.

Image
Credit... Pool photo by Graeme Jennings/EPA, via Shutterstock

The company launched some modest initiatives, promising more transparency, a more robust system of third-party fact checkers and a policy to limit "coordinated inauthentic behavior," but through it all, Mr. Zuckerberg conceded the field to Mr. Trump's demands for unfettered access to the global information bloodstream.

Mr. Zuckerberg rejected internal proposals for operational changes that would reduce epistemic chaos. A political whitelist identified over 100,000 officials and candidates whose accounts were exempted from fact-checking, despite internal research showing that users tend to believe false information shared by politicians. In September 2019 the company said that political advertising would not be subject to fact-checking.

To placate his critics in 2018, Mr. Zuckerberg commissioned a civil rights audit led by Laura Murphy, a former director of the ACLU's Washington legislative office. The report published in 2020 is a cri de coeur expressed in a river of words that bear witness to dashed hopes -- "disheartened," "frustrated," "angry," "dismayed," "fearful," "heartbreaking."

The report is consistent with a nearly complete rupture of the American public's faith in Big Tech. When asked how Facebook would adjust to a political shift toward a possible Biden administration, a company spokesman, Nick Clegg, responded, "We'll adapt to the environment in which we're operating." And so it did. On Jan. 7, the day after it became clear that Democrats would control the Senate, Facebook announced that it would indefinitely block Mr. Trump's account.

We are meant to believe that the destructive effects of epistemic chaos are the inevitable cost of cherished rights to freedom of speech. No. Just as catastrophic levels of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere are the consequence of burning fossil fuels, epistemic chaos is a consequence of surveillance capitalism's bedrock commercial operations, aggravated by political obligations and set into motion by a 20-year-old dream of total information that slid into nightmare. Then a plague came to America, turning the antisocial media conflagration into a wildfire.

... ... ...

The Washington Post reported in late March that with nearly 50 percent of the content on Facebook's news feed related to Covid-19, a very small number of "influential users" were driving the reading habits and feeds of a vast number of users. A study released in April by the Reuters Institute confirmed that high-level politicians, celebrities and other prominent public figures produced 20 percent of the misinformation in their sample, but attracted 69 percent of social media engagements in their sample.

... ... ...

In 1966, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann wrote a short book of seminal importance, "The Social Construction of Reality." Its central observation is that the "everyday life" we experience as "reality" is actively and perpetually constructed by us. This ongoing miracle of social order rests on "common sense knowledge," which is "the knowledge we share with others in the normal self-evident routines of everyday life."

Think about traffic: There are not enough police officers in the world to ensure that every car stops at every red light, yet not every intersection triggers a negotiation or a fight. That's because in orderly societies we all know that red lights have the authority to make us stop and green lights are authorized to let us go. This common sense means that we each act on what we all know, while trusting that others will too. We're not just obeying laws; we are creating order together. Our reward is to live in a world where we mostly get where we are going and home again safely because we can trust one another's common sense. No society is viable without it.

"All societies are constructions in the face of chaos," write Berger and Luckmann. Because norms are summaries of our common sense, norm violation is the essence of terrorism -- terrifying because it repudiates the most taken-for-granted social certainties. "Norm violation creates an attentive audience beyond the target of terror," write Alex P. Schmid and Albert J. Jongman in "Political Terrorism," a widely cited text on the subject. Everyone experiences the shock, disorientation, and fear. The legitimacy and continuity of our institutions are essential because they buffer us from chaos by formalizing our common sense.

... ... ...

For many who hold freedom of speech as a sacred right, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's 1919 dissenting opinion in Abrams v. United States is a touchstone. "The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas," he wrote. "The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market." The corrupt information that dominates the private square does not rise to the top of a free and fair competition of ideas. It wins in a rigged game. No democracy can survive this game.

Our susceptibility to the destruction of common sense reflects a young information civilization that has not yet found its footing in democracy. Unless we interrupt surveillance economics and revoke the license to steal that legitimates its antisocial operations, the other coup will continue to strengthen and produce fresh crises. What must be done now?

... ... ...

Shoshana Zuboff is a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School and the author of "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism."

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here's our email: [email protected] .

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram .


Caledonia Massachusetts Jan. 30 Times Pick

Jaron Lanier has made the same arguments in a more accessible style. "You Are Not A Gadget" and "Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts" are highly recommended!
AW AUS Jan. 30 Times Pick
Professor Zuboff is being polite and cautious. What's been reinvented is no less than the idea of people as property. Your data is owned. Behavior is traded like a commodity. There is limited personal protection. Imagine you live completely off the grid. One day you come into town to get coffee with an old friend. You don't bring any electronic device because you don't own any. You pay in cash. You are 'not' surveilled. Your friend is surveilled. She has a phone and lives typically. The bill has two coffees. A data point is created about you. Scale up to trillions data points and this reflective data gathering spreads like COVID. This isn't benign information either such as your preferred coffee order. The difference between data 'person favours this political party' and metadata 'person looked at a website for this many seconds, liked these posts, walks at this pace or was at such and such location' is merely a mathematical function of utility. With enough data one can be translated to the other and monetized. When placed into a market outcomes like 'engagement' are really euphemisms for inputs that you may consider private like your sexual and reproductive history, your love and spiritual beliefs or who you voted for. Like Climate Change there's no individual 'opt out'. Unlike Climate Change, there are relatively near term solutions.
Surfrank Los Angeles Jan. 30 Times Pick
Had a nice dinner with my daughter and nephew. We used Siri to get to the restaurant. My iphone was on the table while we talked. What came up in conversation was carpet cleaning; something I don't recall e-mailing or texting about. (My place then had hardwood floors) Next day; boom, e-mails and ads from carpet cleaning places all over my e-mail, phone, texts. So does the internet just snag the info you voluntarily give to them? Or connect to companies when you mention something in an a-mail or text? It's worse. Siri actually listens to you while you're chatting over dinner. Try what I've described. Pick a topic you haven't communicated about recently.
Byron Chapin Chattanooga Jan. 30 Times Pick
I've got to confess that I gave up on this about page three. It strikes me as paranoid; 2+2=6, maybe seven. These titians of the internet need to get way better before they are as dangerous as portrayed. It causes me to think of 'how close we are to driverless cars' - no we aren't.
markd michigan Jan. 30 Times Pick
If you don't care about privacy (which many don't) then the digital world is an Eden. People voluntarily post intimate details of their lives willingly. You have to really work at it to have any privacy today. It can be done though. The US needs to take a harder stance towards internet privacy like the EU. Any service that operates in the US needs an opt out clause in their user agreements towards sharing any of their personal information. Most people would just click on the "I Agree to Share" but the people who care about their privacy will opt out.
HB nyc Jan. 30 Times Pick
As an internet executive who has been in the game from the very beginning (1995 and onward), I am still dumbfounded that the overwhelming majority of Google search users have no idea that when they search for a product or a store, for example, the results are not democratically revealed. Using fashion as an example, Google's business model has stores and brands bid on keyword search terms, like "fine lingerie," or "red pumps," or "blue silk robe," to name a few of the billions of search terms.

The stores or brands that bid highest most often appear at the top of the list. As well, above those results sit paid ads, though again, most users do not know those ads are actually ads, as they consider them to be legitimate results.

Over the years, I've read many a user survey on Google search, and still--as savvy as we believe we have become in the online space--most users believe the results at the top of the list must be the best results out there. Talk about a rigged system. Sadly and frighteningly, most of us do not know, or probably even care, that it is.

drollere sebastopol Jan. 30 Times Pick
i've been an admirer of dr. zuboff's take on technology for many years. but it's useful to reverse this analysis and consider it from the corporate side: surveillance economies of scale and AI insights of prediction that allow a herd animal, us, to be more profitably managed and the profit more efficiently extracted.

it's important to see that surveillance fundamentally benefits command and control capabilities: china uses it to command obedience; corporations use it to control profit extraction, and to guide your car GPS. we do not mind that we are being commanded and controlled because this brings us home delivery, voice control systems, GPS navigation, targeted ads, on demand media, vast connectivity and personal media bubbles. these make us feel unique and almost godlike ... Alexa, dim the lights! ... like the hundreds of millions of other herd animals living the same delusion. if we were paid for our data use, we would just become aware of its use. this is a defect in a system designed to make you feel unique and special. that's the kink: at bottom, you like being surveilled and controlled.

you like the commercial and recreational benefits this brings. you don't care who uses what, provided you get all the consumer satisfaction and none of the dark web blowback. i'm not optimistic about "unprecedented solutions." there is no imminent stampede of the herd to get out of the corral. we like it in here.

Rob Philadelphia Jan. 29 Times Pick
My life has gotten better since I deleted Facebook a few years ago. I get fewer updates from high school acquaintances, but my real friendships have continued just the same, and my professional life has improved (since I have one fewer distraction). My anxiety level is also lower. Of course the news over the past year has been a major source of anxiety, but it would have been worse if I'd spent 2020 doom-scrolling on Facebook. I think a lot of people's lives would be better if a lot of people got off social media...for these reasons as well as the important issues this essay addresses.
PlanetSilence Salt Lake City Jan. 29 Times Pick
I'm 100% behind the "surveillance society" as long as corporations and lawmakers are surveilled. But when an Assange or a Snowden proves that the NSA and CIA are criminal enterprises...the dishonest politicians hide behind the Espionage Act to quash the facts.
Until Next Week Park Avenue Jan. 29 Times Pick
Right from the beginning I knew this Internet and social media revolution was dubious Right from the start, I tried never to use my real name on SM or in email addresses...But they figured it out...It's been creepy from day one... Let's regain our old-fashioned anonymity!

[Feb 02, 2021] Would You Be Considered A Domestic Terrorist Under This New Bill by Robert Wheeler

Notable quotes:
"... "It's so dangerous as you guys have been talking about, this is an issue that all Democrats, Republicans, independents, Libertarians should be extremely concerned about, especially because we don't have to guess about where this goes or how this ends," Gabbard said. ..."
"... She continued: "When you have people like former CIA Director John Brennan openly talking about how he's spoken with or heard from appointees and nominees in the Biden administration who are already starting to look across our country for these types of movements similar to the insurgencies they've seen overseas, that in his words, he says make up this unholy alliance of religious extremists, racists, bigots, he lists a few others and at the end, even libertarians." ..."
"... "What characteristics are we looking for as we are building this profile of a potential extremist, what are we talking about? Religious extremists, are we talking about Christians, evangelical Christians, what is a religious extremist? Is it somebody who is pro-life? Where do you take this" ..."
"... "You start looking at obviously, have to be a white person, obviously likely male, libertarians, anyone who loves freedom, liberty, maybe has an American flag outside their house, or people who, you know, attended a Trump rally, " Gabbard said. ..."
Jan 29, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Robert Wheeler via The Organic Prepper blog,

After 9/11, the entire country collectively lost its mind in the throes of fear. During that time, all civil and Constitutional rights were shredded and replaced with the pages of The USA PATRIOT Act .

Almost 20 years later, the U.S. has again lost its collective mind, this time in fear of a "virus" and it's "super mutations" and a "riot" at the capitol. A lot of people called this and to the surprise of very few, much like after 9/11, Americans are watching what remains of their civil liberties be replaced with a new bill.

The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2021

The DTPA is essentially the criminalization of speech, expression, and thought . It takes cancel culture a step further and all but outlaws unpopular opinions . This act will empower intelligence, law enforcement, and even military wings of the American ruling class to crack down on individuals adhering to certain belief systems and ideologies.

According to MI Congressman Fred Upton:

"The attack on the U.S. Capitol earlier this month was the latest example of domestic terrorism, but the threat of domestic terrorism remains very real. We cannot turn a blind eye to it," Upton said. "The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act will equip our law enforcement leaders with the tools needed to help keep our homes, families, and communities across the country safe.

Congressman Upton's website gives the following information on DTPA:

The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2021 would strengthen the federal government's efforts to prevent, report on, respond to, and investigate acts of domestic terrorism by authorizing offices dedicated to combating this threat; requiring these offices to regularly assess this threat; and providing training and resources to assist state, local, and tribal law enforcement in addressing it.

DTPA would authorize three offices, one each within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), to monitor, investigate, and prosecute cases of domestic terrorism. The bill also requires these offices to provide Congress with joint, biannual reports assessing the state of domestic terrorism threats, with a specific focus on white supremacists. Based on the data collected, DTPA requires these offices to focus their resources on the most significant threats.

DTPA also codifies the Domestic Terrorism Executive Committee, which would coordinate with United States Attorneys and other public safety officials to promote information sharing and ensure an effective, responsive, and organized joint effort to combat domestic terrorism. The legislation requires DOJ, FBI, and DHS to provide training and resources to assist state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies in understanding, detecting, deterring, and investigating acts of domestic terrorism and white supremacy. Finally, DTPA directs DHS, DOJ, FBI, and the Department of Defense to establish an interagency task force to combat white supremacist infiltration of the uniformed services and federal law enforcement.

Those who read the bill aren't so gung ho to shred the Constitution

Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has some serious reservations. In a recent interview on Fox News Primetime, Gabbard stated that the bill effectively criminalizes half of the country. (Emphasis ours)

"It's so dangerous as you guys have been talking about, this is an issue that all Democrats, Republicans, independents, Libertarians should be extremely concerned about, especially because we don't have to guess about where this goes or how this ends," Gabbard said.

She continued: "When you have people like former CIA Director John Brennan openly talking about how he's spoken with or heard from appointees and nominees in the Biden administration who are already starting to look across our country for these types of movements similar to the insurgencies they've seen overseas, that in his words, he says make up this unholy alliance of religious extremists, racists, bigots, he lists a few others and at the end, even libertarians."

Gabbard, stating her concern about how the government will define what qualities they are searching for in potential threats to the country, went on to ask:

"What characteristics are we looking for as we are building this profile of a potential extremist, what are we talking about? Religious extremists, are we talking about Christians, evangelical Christians, what is a religious extremist? Is it somebody who is pro-life? Where do you take this"

Tulsi said the bill would create a dangerous undermining of our civil liberties and freedoms in our Constitution. She also stated the DPTA essentially targets nearly half of the United States.

"You start looking at obviously, have to be a white person, obviously likely male, libertarians, anyone who loves freedom, liberty, maybe has an American flag outside their house, or people who, you know, attended a Trump rally, " Gabbard said.

Tulsi Gabbard is not the only one to criticize the legislation

Even the ACLU , one of the weakest organizations on civil liberties in the United States, has spoken out. While the ACLU was only concerned with how the bill would affect minorities or "brown people," the organization stated that the legislation, while set forth under the guise of countering white supremacy, would eventually be used against non-white people.

The ACLU's statement is true.

As with similar bills submitted under the guise of "protecting" Americans against outside threats, this bill will inevitably expand further. The stated goals of the DPTA are far-reaching and frightening enough. It would amount to an official declaration of the end to Free Speech.

Soon there will be no rights left for Americans

In the last twenty years, Americans have lost their 4th Amendment rights, and now they are losing their 1st. All that remains is the 2nd Amendment , and both the ruling class and increasing numbers of the American people know it.

Dark days are ahead.

[Jan 29, 2021] The phenomenon of Donald Trump the villain President has been used as an excuse to destroy free speech and shoe horn in authoritarian policies\

Due to the immense power of propaganda, normal people who should identify politically as the "left" are actually supporting these dangerous policies and the erosions of liberty are accelerating in direct proportion to the level of resistance, such as r/Wallstreetbets and the immediate crackdown across several platforms to stop them.
Jan 29, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org
Rutherford82 , Jan 28 2021 18:40 utc | 5

I've seen an extraordinary erosion of rights and liberties over the past few years. It really started with the cover up after the Trump election, which sought to steer the narrative of public opinion away from the failure of the Clintons and the Democratic machine with obvious fantastic lies about Russia.

For a myriad of reasons probably understood best by likes of Freud, Jüng, and others, everyone on the left (who are supposed to be the smart and rational ones in society) bought these lies and repeated them.

Once this was allowed to happen, once Maddow was allowed to lead the vanguard of libel with no recourse, the snowball began to roll and now we are seeing the enforcement of that thought-policing, which is as unconstitutional as the libel itself, especially considering it is being perpetrated ubiquitously among media owners.

The phenomenon of Donald Trump the villain President has been used as an excuse to destroy free speech and shoe horn in authoritarian policies. Due to the immense power of propaganda, normal people who should identify politically as the "left" are actually supporting these dangerous policies and the erosions of liberty are accelerating in direct proportion to the level of resistance, such as r/Wallstreetbets and the immediate crackdown across several platforms to stop them.

This Wall St. favoritism is obvious, but will likely end without bankers taking much damage besides some short term outrage. They still control all the levers of currency and trade no matter the President.

The real dangers of the day are the clamping down on speech. Starting with imprisoning Julian Assange and then migrating to various corners of the Internet. I'll be very interested to see how things shake out with the stock market, but I imagine it will go back to the firm grip of those who control the money supply, which it was for a very long time.

In the meantime, shutting down the Reddit forums and Discord servers is a very serious danger and I hope we can shine a light on it.

[Jan 28, 2021] Diana Johnstones "Fools Crusade" goes into the destabilization efforts made by various EU and Nato entities to precipitate the break up. It's where the Clintons beta tested the nation breaking tools Bush/Cheney began deploying around the world.

Jan 28, 2021 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Eustache de Saint Pierre , January 27, 2021 at 7:18 am

It's part & parcel here especially from DUP types who sometimes appear to be living in a fantasy world – Shinners not so much but I imagine that SF dissidents have similar extreme positions & all of this comes from some intelligent & professional people not just the malleable mobs. Meanwhile there is a turf war for the gangster versions of both UVF & UDA hitting the streets in Belfast.

I recall a few years back reading an account from a British Army general who was familiar with both Northern Ireland & the former Yugoslavia before they blew up, who in both instances was shocked by how people who had for the most part lived happily side by side within a relatively short space of time became sworn enemies. All of that had a religious background with the latter including ethnicity, but to him both sides in both cases spiraled down through negative reactions into extremes, becoming in the end each others sworn enemies.

Politics & Class have I believe caused the same fractures & after all the successful & presumably intelligent PMC also have their deplorable others that are largely a construction based on generalisations & stereotypes, while sadly peace & reconciliation efforts as far as I can tell always appear to arrive as an epilogue to a very bad book.

vlade , January 27, 2021 at 8:33 am

Yugoslavia definitely didn't live happily side by side. Its tensions were hidden under Tito, but existed before (cf WW2 Croats vs Serbs, as most visible example), and blew up after, to a great extent because they were so supressed before w/o any reasonable outlet. It might have given a semblance of "happines", but it wasn't really there.

Can't comment on NI.

Wukchumni , January 27, 2021 at 9:11 am

I was only in Yugoslavia once for about a week in 1982, and you could see what a mess it was in the making. I'm used to Europeans drinking, but Belgrade made em' look like teetotalers. Add in age old tensions and kaboom!

One of the biggest hyperinflationary episodes came out of their civil war, only to be eclipsed in the numbers game by Zimbabwe after the turn of the century.

The Rev Kev , January 27, 2021 at 9:46 am

I was going through Yugoslavia by train in 1981 and the one thing that struck me looking out the windows was flags. You had Yugoslavian flags everywhere you looked to the point that it was almost a fetish. It was only years later that I wondered if the point of those flags was to encourage the different groups to think of themselves as Yugoslavians first and foremost.

Robert Gray , January 27, 2021 at 12:26 pm

> flags everywhere you looked to the point that it was almost a fetish.

Erm that sounds just like the US of A.

a different chris , January 27, 2021 at 9:21 am

> to a great extent because they were so supressed before w/o any reasonable outlet.

But this seems to excuse the fighting? If everybody was "suppressed" then why did they kick sideways, rather than up? As I think I said once before, my friend from Serbia would say "I'd be on "my" side of the street and "they" would be shooting at me, and then I'd cross the street and "my" people would be shooting at me".

He, like so many nowadays, came to the US not because this was some beacon of hope but because where he lived, a place he loved for many reasons, was that messed up.

Reading Wikipedia I come across this tiresome sentence: "The Croat quest for independence led to large Serb communities within Croatia rebelling and trying to secede from the Croat republic. Serbs in Croatia would not accept a status of a national minority in a sovereign Croatia, since they would be demoted from the status of a constituent nation of the entirety of Yugoslavia."

Croats? Serbs? Like they are fundamentally different species? It's as bad as the Reconstruction South, but per my example above people didn't even have different colored skin, heck they were physically indistinguishable. They just wanted something they themselves couldn't even describe without foaming at the mouth.

To be considered above somebody else by birth was what it really was.

Oh, and another head-banging quote: "the "Croatian Spring" protest in the 1970s was backed by large numbers of Croats who claimed that Yugoslavia remained a Serb hegemony and demanded that Serbia's powers be reduced .Tito, whose home republic was Croatia,"

An iron-fisted dictator runs the country, he is from Croatia, yet the country is considered by Croatians to be "Serb hegemony". Ok whatever, hey it does make more sense than following a normal-height dark-haired dark-eyed man because he says that tall blond-haired blue eyed people are superior. And that was a short-by-American-standards drive away

We can give the globe a spin and find the same idiocy in Asia, where "they all look alike" to western eyes but oh boy they slaughter each other just as regularly as we do.

Ok I'm done ranting. What a plague on the planet this species is.

vlade , January 27, 2021 at 9:51 am

Kicking sideways (or downwards) is always easier than kicking upwards, especially if people were doing it for years.

Otherwise, you're just accentuating my point – and I agree with you. It was incredible watching people in pub who were getting on very well until one of them asked where the other was from, and that has changed the whole atmosphere.

Wukchumni , January 27, 2021 at 9:59 am

My cousin from Prague came to America in the late 90's to live on a genuine ranch for a spell and go on a long roadtrip in search of

So he gets pulled over for speeding in a red state and gives the officer his Czech drivers license, and he told me the officer went into a harangue over all the ethnic cleansing that was going on in his country, and how sorry he was about it, and let him off.

Cousin was torn between telling the copper, nah that's a few countries over, but went for the victim card instead.

vlade , January 27, 2021 at 11:23 am

Hah, do you know the Western press brain-melt induced by having Slovakia and Slovenia (which, moreover have very similar flags..) in the same World Cup (soccer) 2022 qualification group?

ex-PFC Chuck , January 27, 2021 at 11:26 am

Croats? Serbs? Like they are fundamentally different species?

Not different species, but different religions; Roman and Orthodox Catholicism, respectively. Think German-speaking Europe during the Thirty Years War.

km , January 27, 2021 at 1:33 pm

The irony of course is that, in 1992, Croats for the most part didn't go to mass, Serbs did go to Liturgy, and Bosniak Muslims thought beer went well with their pork chops.

Think of it not as a religious war, but a re-hash of WWII.

jsn , January 27, 2021 at 4:19 pm

Diana Johnstones "Fools Crusade" goes into the destabilization efforts made by various EU and Nato entities to precipitate the break up. It's where the Clintons beta tested the nation breaking tools Bush/Cheney began deploying around the world.

Karl Von Hapsburg and the Pope were both involved in prying the Catholic portions loose from the Yugoslav federation and bringing them back into the Mont Pelerin orbit of the former Habsburg empire.

The Orthodox regions have been left to the Russians with black markets to everyone's benefit and the Bosnians given the standard settler/colonial treatment of designated "races."

Eustache de Saint Pierre , January 27, 2021 at 12:29 pm

Vlade – perhaps I should not have used the word happily but basically neighbours were not killing each other as was also mainly the case in NI, although there were tensions gradually building up in tandem with the Civil Rights movement based on the MLK. model.

I don't know what the tipping point was in the Balkans, but in NI it was the treatment received by the marchers & the likes of the Bogside at the hands of the B specials & RUC in Derry which gradually spread elsewhere in mass battles between mobs from both sides & the above armed cops. All of this capped off in 72 by the Provos most successful recruiting campaign courtesy of the Parachute regiment on Bloody Sunday, while about that time around 10,000 Catholic refugees crossed into the Republic.

PlutoniumKun , January 27, 2021 at 12:02 pm

If the General thought that people in NI lived happily side by side before the Troubles, then he was sorely misinformed. Tensions were always very strong, although not just religious ones. In Dublin growing up I had neighbours who were Belfast protestants but had been driving out of Belfast because their grandfather was involved in a shipyard trade union and that was sufficient for him to have been labeled as a communist and Taig lover.

Eustache de Saint Pierre , January 27, 2021 at 12:43 pm

Yes happily was the wrong word but in the North outside of the cities there was mixing & occasionally mixed marriages.

You are very correct in relation to the troubles in the shipyards, which I read a few books about in prep for a statue. Funny thing is that during my 2 stints at the Titanic studios for GoT I was informed by the top man that many of the tradesmen were ex paramilitaries from both sides who managed to work well together for a decade, but in separate teams. That was also tjhe case during the yearly Wraps where they all took full advantage of the free bars but besides a few scuffles, there was never any real trouble.

A lot of the work would have been carried out in the original paint hall.

vlade , January 27, 2021 at 2:56 pm

Oooh.. Reminds me of E.T. Setton's Two Savages and the difference between "Emmy Grants" and "Passengers"..

Eustache de Saint Pierre , January 27, 2021 at 7:58 pm

You have lost me there Vlade ( If you were indeed commenting on my post ) as I don't know the book, but you have reminded me of one very violent incident on location in Spain between 2 Catholics in a bar. It was due to one of them being a member of another group of savages that plagued Belfast as the other 2 wound down.

They were called the Hoodies who were part of the huge crime wave that hit Belfast as a consequence of the Troubles. It was cleaned up in Catholic areas over about 7 years under the command of Bobby Storey.

[Jan 27, 2021] Germany becomes a sort of alibi for the USA actions -- no matter how bad things are here, we're not that bad. We're not as bad as the Germans

Jan 27, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

james , Jan 27 2021 0:15 utc | 85

quote from an article i am reading on alex ross interview...Alex Ross is the music critic of The New Yorker, among other things.. its a bit of a controversial comment which i why i am sharing it..

"America -- people have said this in so many ways -- is in need of the kind of self-examination that has become widespread in Germany. For all of its problems, the culture of working through the past is very strong in Germany. Susan Neiman recently wrote a brilliant book, Learning from the Germans, drawing a line between the German examination of the Nazi past and the Holocaust and America's, to put it mildly, very incomplete reckoning with racism, slavery, the Native American genocide, and everything else. As I say in the book, Germany becomes a sort of alibi for us -- no matter how bad things are here, we're not that bad. We're not as bad as the Germans. That undertow exists whenever German history and German culture are discussed in America. Consider the incredible profusion of books on the Nazi period that you see in bookstores -- there's always an element of wanting to go back this period when America seemed to be purely on the side of good and the Germans were absolute evil. It makes us feel better about ourselves. And so we have these Nazi characters in movies over and over -- good down-to-earth Americans out there battling evil Germans who are playing Wagner on their Victrolas, which is literally something that happens in one of the Captain America movies. It's a comforting myth, one that needs to be shaken up a bit."

Interview with Alex Ross

[Jan 25, 2021] It's all totalitarianism.

Jan 25, 2021 | www.unz.com

anti_republocrat , says: January 25, 2021 at 7:51 pm GMT • 7.0 hours ago

@anon

Globalists tell the people they are for mankind and Mother Earth, against corporate exploitation. Once in control after a year of planpanic and the Great Reset, globalists will operate for the benefit of those in control of the world's largest corporations.

In all three "different" systems, the people begin to wake up too late. The only way for those who have seized control to stay in control is to suppress the "have nots." This leads inevitably to totalitarian control and tyranny.

Thus, communism, fascism and globalism differ only in rhetoric. In all things that matter they are identical. It's all totalitarianism.

[Jan 25, 2021] A hallmark of totalitarian societies is that there's no escape from politics and the dominant state ideology by Neil Clark

Jan 24, 2021 | www.rt.com

A hallmark of totalitarian societies is that there's no escape from politics and the dominant state ideology. Recent events demonstrate that we've now sadly reached that point in Britain, the US and other Western countries.

...In the choice between the personal and the political, between listening to the politician, or romancing (even if only in his imagination), the poet chooses the personal. He is right to do so. Totalitarian societies come about when people do the opposite. They put politics before the personal. They betray old friendships for 'the cause', or put 'following the party line' before family and loved ones.

...Things that used to be apolitical have become completely politicised. There is no 'ring-fencing' any more. I have to say, even as someone who makes my living as a political commentator, I'm absolutely sick of the way politics has infected every aspect of our lives

...While the US presidential inauguration was being televised, and viewers were no doubt being told repeatedly what a 'great day for democracy' it was, I was doing a jigsaw puzzle. Believe me, it was far more rewarding.

Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66

sarcastictruth 17 hours ago 24 Jan, 2021 06:38 AM

Political correctness is the means by which the powers that be/the elite/the globalists control the masses. Why do people demonstrate political correctness? To show what a "good person" they and how they are aware of "social issues". That's why people strive to be politically correct. Its the reason we are in the lockdown situation, people accept the lockdown because you are deemed politically incorrect (a bad person) if you don't. People mistake that politically correctness is about fighting racism, whilst racism against black people is condemned, racism against white people is actively encourage. This shows political correctness has nothing to do with fighting racism, fighting gender inequality, or about being a good person. It has everything to do with fostering division amongst people and controlling the opinion of the masses.
Cl K-berg 13 hours ago 24 Jan, 2021 10:33 AM
100%. Here's a great extract for essay quotation: ''We should turn off television programmes masquerading as 'drama' or 'comedy' that are really political sermons dolled up in entertainment's clothing and provide no enjoyment whatsoever.'' Wow! how totally spot on.

[Jan 25, 2021] Reporter critical of Antifa flees US amid threats as 'POLITICAL REFUGEE,' decades after his parents arrived as asylum seekers

Jan 25, 2021 | www.rt.com

Journalist Andy Ngo, whose parents fled to the US from Vietnam in 1978, has become a political refugee himself, fleeing to London, saying he received death threats from Antifa over his coverage of the movement.

"For a number of months now, there's just been increasing threats of violence against me, promises by Antifa extremists to kill me," the Portland native said Saturday night in a Sky News interview. Local law enforcement authorities did nothing about the alleged threats, even when Ngo provided names of the suspects, he said.

"It's pained me a lot, temporarily having to leave the country and home that settled my parents who came there as political refugees," Ngo added.

Ngo came to increased prominence after he was attacked by a mob of Antifa protesters in 2019. There have been no arrests in connection with that attack – in which Ngo was beaten, robbed and hospitalized with a brain injury – even though it was caught on camera from various angles and the journalist's lawyer provided names of suspects to police.

//www.youtube.com/embed/KlCTpywgEQk

Some Antifa members have condemned Ngo for "enabling fascism" and exposing them to danger by reporting their names and posting their arrest photos. He was vilified by Rolling Stone magazine, which branded him as a "right-wing troll" and said he tries to "demonize" Antifa.

Hatred towards Ngo apparently escalated even further with the upcoming publication of his book, 'Unmasked', which chronicles Antifa's history of violence and its "radical plan to destroy democracy."

The protests, which some observers called "modern-day book burning," may have had an unintended consequence by bringing more attention to 'Unmasked'. The book, which is scheduled for release on February 2, is already the No. 1 seller in several political categories on Amazon.com. At one point earlier this month, it was the overall top seller by the online behemoth.

READ MORE 'Modern-day book burners': Portland bookstore forced to evacuate after protesters demand it pulls book critical of Antifa 'Modern-day book burners': Portland bookstore forced to evacuate after protesters demand it pulls book critical of Antifa

Ngo said the same Democrat politicians who have condemned and magnified the January 6 US Capitol riot were silent "at best" when Antifa and Black Lives Matter plagued Portland with 120 days of riots, including violent attacks on a federal courthouse, last year. He said some even promoted crowdfunding efforts to get rioters out of jail, while others described federal law enforcement officers as "Trump's Gestapo and secret police."

Rioting in Portland was so bad on President Joe Biden's Inauguration Day that 15 Antifa activists were arrested, nearly half of whom had been busted and released for similar crimes last year, Ngo said. "This is a nightmare version of Groundhog Day," he added.

Reminded that Biden had called Antifa "an idea, not an organization" during last year's presidential campaign, Ngo pointed out that documents leaked to him show Antifa's organizational setup, including processes for recruiting, radicalizing and vetting new members.

"Very sad," author Julia Smith said of Ngo's fleeing to London. "This is not the America his parents sought."

[Jan 24, 2021] The Deep State's Stealthy, Subversive, Silent Coup to Ensure Nothing Changes - Global ResearchGlobal Research - Centre for Re

Notable quotes:
"... "You have such a fervent, passionate, evangelical faith in this country why in the name of God don't you have any faith in the system of government you're so hell-bent to protect? You want to defend the United States of America, then defend it with the tools it supplies you with -- its Constitution. You ask for a mandate, General, from a ballot box. You don't steal it after midnight, when the country has its back turned." -- Seven Days in May (1964) ..."
"... That January 6 attempt by so-called insurrectionists to overturn the election results was not the real coup, however. Those who answered President Trump's call to march on the Capitol were merely the fall guys, manipulated into creating the perfect crisis for the Deep State -- a.k.a. the Police State a.k.a. the Military Industrial Complex a.k.a. the Techno-Corporate State a.k.a. the Surveillance State -- to swoop in and take control. ..."
"... It took no time at all for the switch to be thrown and the nation's capital to be placed under a military lockdown, online speech forums restricted, and individuals with subversive or controversial viewpoints ferreted out, investigated, shamed and/or shunned . ..."
"... Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America ..."
"... Seven Days in May ..."
"... Seven Days in May ..."
"... domestic right-wing extremism ..."
"... Battlefield America: The War on the American People ..."
"... This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute . ..."
Jan 24, 2021 | www.globalresearch.ca

"You have such a fervent, passionate, evangelical faith in this country why in the name of God don't you have any faith in the system of government you're so hell-bent to protect? You want to defend the United States of America, then defend it with the tools it supplies you with -- its Constitution. You ask for a mandate, General, from a ballot box. You don't steal it after midnight, when the country has its back turned." -- Seven Days in May (1964)

No doubt about it: the coup d'etat was successful.

That January 6 attempt by so-called insurrectionists to overturn the election results was not the real coup, however. Those who answered President Trump's call to march on the Capitol were merely the fall guys, manipulated into creating the perfect crisis for the Deep State -- a.k.a. the Police State a.k.a. the Military Industrial Complex a.k.a. the Techno-Corporate State a.k.a. the Surveillance State -- to swoop in and take control.

It took no time at all for the switch to be thrown and the nation's capital to be placed under a military lockdown, online speech forums restricted, and individuals with subversive or controversial viewpoints ferreted out, investigated, shamed and/or shunned .

This new order didn't emerge into being this week, or this month, or even this year, however.

Indeed, the real coup happened when our government "of the people, by the people, for the people" was overthrown by a profit-driven, militaristic, techno-corporate state that is in cahoots with a government "of the rich, by the elite, for the corporations."

We've been mired in this swamp for decades now.

Every successive president starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt has been bought lock, stock and barrel and made to dance to the Deep State's tune.

Enter Donald Trump, the candidate who swore to drain the swamp in Washington DC. Instead of putting an end to the corruption, however, Trump paved the way for lobbyists, corporations, the military industrial complex, and the Deep State to feast on the carcass of the dying American republic.

Joe Biden will be no different: his job is to keep the Deep State in power.

Step away from the cult of personality politics and you'll find that beneath the power suits, they're all alike.

Follow the money. It always points the way.

As Bertram Gross noted in Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America , " evil now wears a friendlier face than ever before in American history ."

Writing in 1980, Gross predicted a future in which he saw:

a new despotism creeping slowly across America. Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and, more important, the subversion of our constitution. More broadly, consequences include widespread intervention in international politics through economic manipulation, covert action, or military invasion

This stealthy, creeping, silent coup that Gross prophesied is the same danger that writer Rod Serling envisioned in the 1964 political thriller Seven Days in May , a clear warning to beware of martial law packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation's security.

Incredibly enough, almost 60 years later, we find ourselves hostages to a government run more by military doctrine and corporate greed than by the rule of law established in the Constitution. Indeed, proving once again that fact and fiction are not dissimilar, today's current events could well have been lifted straight out of Seven Days in May , which takes viewers into eerily familiar terrain.

American Apocalypse: The Government's Plot to Destabilize the Nation Is Working

The premise is straightforward.

With the Cold War at its height, an unpopular U.S. President signs a momentous nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. Believing that the treaty constitutes an unacceptable threat to the security of the United States and certain that he knows what is best for the nation, General James Mattoon Scott (played by Burt Lancaster), the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and presidential hopeful, plans a military takeover of the national government. When Gen. Scott's aide, Col. Casey (Kirk Douglas), discovers the planned military coup, he goes to the President with the information. The race for command of the U.S. government begins, with the clock ticking off the hours until the military plotters plan to overthrow the President.

Needless to say, while on the big screen, the military coup is foiled and the republic is saved in a matter of hours, in the real world, the plot thickens and spreads out over the past half century.

We've been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long -- sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs -- that it's hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we've been on that fast-moving, downward trajectory for some time now.

The question is no longer whether the U.S. government will be preyed upon and taken over by the military industrial complex. That's a done deal, but martial law disguised as national security is only one small part of the greater deception we've been fooled into believing is for our own good.

How do you get a nation to docilely accept a police state? How do you persuade a populace to accept metal detectors and pat downs in their schools, bag searches in their train stations, tanks and military weaponry used by their small town police forces, surveillance cameras in their traffic lights, police strip searches on their public roads, unwarranted blood draws at drunk driving checkpoints, whole body scanners in their airports, and government agents monitoring their communications?

Try to ram such a state of affairs down the throats of the populace, and you might find yourself with a rebellion on your hands. Instead, you bombard them with constant color-coded alerts, terrorize them with shootings and bomb threats in malls, schools, and sports arenas, desensitize them with a steady diet of police violence, and sell the whole package to them as being for their best interests.

This present military occupation of the nation's capital by 25,000 troops as part of the so-called "peaceful" transfer of power from one administration to the next is telling.

This is not the language of a free people. This is the language of force.

Still, you can't say we weren't warned.

Back in 2008, an Army War College report revealed that "widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security." The 44-page report went on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, "unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order , purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters."

In 2009, reports by the Department of Homeland Security surfaced that labelled right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) and called on the government to subject such targeted individuals to full-fledged pre-crime surveillance. Almost a decade later, after spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism .

Meanwhile, the police have been transformed into extensions of the military while the nation itself has been transformed into a battlefield. This is what a state of undeclared martial law looks like, when you can be arrested, tasered, shot, brutalized and in some cases killed merely for not complying with a government agent's order or not complying fast enough. This hasn't just been happening in crime-ridden inner cities. It's been happening all across the country.

And then you've got the government, which has been steadily amassing an arsenal of military weapons for use domestically and equipping and training their "troops" for war. Even government agencies with largely administrative functions such as the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Smithsonian have been acquiring body armor, riot helmets and shields, cannon launchers and police firearms and ammunition. In fact, there are now at least 120,000 armed federal agents carrying such weapons who possess the power to arrest.

Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that has been colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable . It's not just the drones, fusion centers , license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You're also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars , your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.

So you see, January 6 and its aftermath provided the government and its corporate technocrats the perfect excuse to show off all of the powers they've been amassing so assiduously over the years.

Mind you, by "government," I'm not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats.

I'm referring to "government" with a capital "G," the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

I'm referring to the corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House.

This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of its citizenry.

Brace yourself.

There is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn't bode well for the future of this country.

Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the antics of the political ruling class that they are oblivious to all else, you'd better beware.

Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you'd better beware.

And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you'd better beware.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People , we are at our most vulnerable right now.

All of those dastardly seeds we have allowed the government to sow under the guise of national security are bearing demon fruit.

The gravest threat facing us as a nation is not extremism but despotism, exercised by a ruling class whose only allegiance is to power and money.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute .

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute . His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People is available at www.amazon.com . Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected] . He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

[Jan 24, 2021] Big Tech and the Democratic Party Are Leading America to a Fascist Future by Robert Bridge

Jan 15, 2021 | www.strategic-culture.org

It should be shocking to Republicans and Democrats alike that the Commander-in-Chief of the United States is banished from all of the main social media platforms – Twitter, Facebook and YouTube – denying him the ability to communicate with his 75 million constituents, or one half of the electorate. This is real and unprecedented violence being committed against the body politic and far more worrisome than any breach of federal property, as loathsome as such an act may be.

The Capitol building is, after all, ultimately a mere symbol of our freedoms and liberties, whereas the rights laid down in the U.S. Constitution –the First Amendment not least of all – are fragile and coming under sustained assault every single day. Why does the left refuse to show the same concern for an aging piece of parchment, arguably the greatest political document ever written, as it does for a piece of architecture? The answer to that riddle is becoming increasingly obvious.

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Big Tech began its slide towards marked fascist tendencies thanks to one of the greatest hoaxes ever foisted upon the American public, known as Russiagate. One after another, Silicon Valley overlords were called before Congressional committees to explain "how and why Russian operatives were given free rein to tamper with 2016 U.S. election," in favor of the populist Donald Trump, no less.

After this made for television 'dressing down', the Big Tech executives at Google, Facebook, Twitter and others got busy reconfiguring their software algorithms in such a way that thousands of internet creators suddenly lost not only a lifetime of hard work and their sustenance, but their voice as well. This is the moment that Big Tech and the Democrats began to really march in lockstep. A new dark age of 'McCarthyism' had settled upon the nation, which gave the left unlimited powers for blocking user accounts they deemed "suspicious," which meant anyone on the right. Now, getting 'shadow banned,' demonetized and outright banned from these platforms has become the new dystopian reality for those with a conservative message to convey. And the fact that the story of 'Russian collusion' was finally exposed as a dirty little lie did nothing to loosen the corporate screws.

Incidentally, as a very large footnote to this story, Big Tech and Big Business have not dished out the same amount of medieval-style punishment to other violators of the public peace. The most obvious example comes courtesy of Black Lives Matter, the Soros-funded social-justice movement that has wreaked havoc across a broad swath of the heartland following the death of George Floyd during an arrest by a white police officer.

Both BLM and Trump supporters believe they have a very large grudge to bear. The former believes they are being unfairly targeted by police due to the color of their skin, while the latter believes they are not getting fair treatment by the mainstream media due to 'Trump Derangement Syndrome', and possibly also due in part to their skin color. But at this point the similarities between BLM and Trump voters come to a screeching halt.

Taking it as gospel that America suffers from 'systemic racism' (it doesn't, although that is not to say that pockets of racism against all colors and creeds doesn't exist), dozens of corporations jumped on the woke bandwagon to express their support for Black Lives Matter at the very same time the latter's members were looting and burning neighborhoods across the nation. Strangely, violence has never shocked the progressive left, so long as the violence supported its agenda.

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Here are just some of the ways the corporate world responded to charges that America was a racist cauldron ready to blow, as reported by The Washington Post: "Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, knelt alongside employees during his visit to a Chase branch. Bank of America pledged $1 billion to fight racial inequality in America. Tech companies have invested big dollars in Black Lives Matter, the Center for Policing Equity, Colin Kaepernick's Know Your Rights Camp and other entities engaged in racial justice efforts " And the list goes on and on.

Of course, private corporations are free to express their solidarity with whatever group they wish. The problem, however, is that these monopolistic monstrosities have an overwhelming tendency to pledge allegiance to liberal, progressive values, as opposed to maybe steering clear of politics altogether. Nowhere was Corporate America's political agenda more obvious than in the aftermath of the siege of the Capitol building on January 6, which led to the death of five people.

Corporate America missed a very good opportunity to keep quiet and remain neutral with regards to an issue of incredible partisan significance. Instead, it unleashed a salvo of attacks on Trump supporters, even denying them access to basic services.

Aside from the most obvious and alarming 'disappearing act,' that of POTUS being removed from the major social media platforms, were countless lesser names caught up in the 'purge.'

One such person is conservative commentator and former baseball star Curt Schilling, who says that AIG terminated his insurance policy over his "social media profile," which was sympathetic to Donald Trump, according to Summit News. "We will be just fine, but wanted to let Americans know that @AIGinsurance canceled our insurance due to my "Social Media profile," tweeted Schilling.

"The agent told us it was a decision made by and with their PR department in conjunction with management," he added.

While all forms of 'cancel culture' (which seems to be part of a move to build American society along the lines of the Chinese 'social credit system,' which rewards those who toe the party line, and punishes those who fall out of favor) are egregious and counterintuitive to American values, perhaps the most astonishing was the cancellation of Republican Senator Josh Hawley's book deal with Simon and Shuster.

"We did not come to this decision lightly," Simon & Schuster said in a statement over Twitter. "As a publisher it will always be our mission to amplify a variety of voices and viewpoints: At the same time we take seriously our larger public responsibility as citizens, and cannot support Senator Hawley after his role in what became a dangerous threat."

The so-called "threat" was a photograph of Hawley raising a fist to the crowd that had assembled outside of the Capitol building before it had breached the security perimeter. It seems that corporations may now serve as judge, jury and executioner when it comes to how Americans behave in public. Is it a crime that Hawley acknowledged a crowd of supporters who were at the time behind the gates of the Capitol building? Apparently it is.

By the way, the name of the Hawley's book? 'The Tyranny of Big Tech'. How's that for irony?

In conclusion, it would be a huge mistake for the Democrats to believe that they are safe from the same sort of corporate and government behavior that has now dramatically silenced the conservative voice across the nation. The United States has entered dangerous unchartered waters, and by all indications it would appear that the American people have inherited a 'soft' form of fascism.

Although there may not be troops and tanks on the streets and a dictator inciting crowds from his bully pulpit, the end result has been pretty much the same: the brutal elimination of one half of the American population from all of the due protections provided by the U.S. Constitution due to an unholy alliance between corporate and government power, which is the very definition of fascism. Democrats, you may very well be next, so enjoy your victory while you still can.

[Jan 22, 2021] Fascism is opposed to usury and the power of the international banking cartel. Whether Italy, Spain, or Portugal, the bankers were squeezed. The US "fascism" is a product of the banks, not an opponent.

Jan 22, 2021 | www.unz.com

Curmudgeon , says: January 21, 2021 at 10:35 pm GMT • 3.5 hours ago

@Cthulu Smith

Fascism is opposed to usury and the power of the international banking cartel. Whether Italy, Spain, or Portugal, the bankers were squeezed. The US "fascism" is a product of the banks, not an opponent.

[Jan 22, 2021] The Coming New Order

Highly recommended!
Jan 22, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

For many years, a handful of people have postulated that those who control industry, finance and governments are essentially the same people – a cabal of sorts that have, over generations, solidified their relationships in order to gain greater wealth and power, whilst systematically making things ever more difficult for the free market to exist.

But why should this be? Surely, corporate leaders are more ardently capitalist than anyone else?

Well, on the surface, that might appear to make sense, but once a significant position of power has been achieved, those who have achieved it recognize that, since they've already reached the top, the primary concern changes. From then on, the primary concern becomes the assurance that no others are able to climb so high as they have.

At that point, they realise that their foremost effort needs to be a push toward corporatism – the merger of power between government and business. This is a natural marriage. The political world is a parasitic one. It relies on a continual flow of funding. The world of big business is a study in exclusivity – the ability to make it impossible for pretenders to the throne to arise. So, big business provides the cash; government provides protective legislation that ensures preference for those at the top.

In most cases, this second half of the equation does not mean a monopoly for just one corporation, but a monopoly for a cabal – an elite group of corporations.

This corporatist relationship has deep roots in the US, going back over one hundred years. To this day, those elite families who took control of oil, steel, banking, motor vehicles and other industries a century ago, soon created a takeover of higher learning (universities), health (Big Pharma) and "Defense" (the military-industrial complex).

Through legislation, the US was then transformed to ensure that all these interests would be catered to, creating generations of both control and profit.

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Of course, "profit" should not be an evil word, but under crony capitalism, it becomes an abomination – a distortion of the free market and the death of laissez faire economics.

Certainly, this sort of collectivism is not what Karl Marx had in mind when he daydreamed about a workers' paradise in which business leaders retained all the risk and responsibility of creating and building businesses, whilst the workers had the final word as to how the revenue would be distributed to the workers themselves.

Mister Marx failed in being objective enough to understand that if the business creator took all the risk and responsibility but gave up the ability to decide what happened to the revenue, he'd never bother to open a business. Even a shoeshine boy would reject such a notion and elect to go on the dole, rather than work.

Mister Marx sought more to bring down those who were successful than to raise up those who were not, yet he unwittingly created a new idea – corporate collectivism – in which the very people he sought to debase used the appeal of collectivist rhetoric to diminish both the freedoms and wealth of the average worker.

On the surface, this might appear to be a hard sell – to get the hoi polloi into the net – but in fact, it's quite easy and has perennially been effective.

Hitler's New Order was such a construct – the promise to return Germany to greatness and the German people to prosperity through increasingly draconian laws, warfare and an economic revolving door between government and industry.

Of course, a major influx of capital was required – billions of dollars – and this was eagerly provided by US industry and banks. Heads of New York banks not only funded Nazi industry; families such as the Fords, Rockefellers, Morgans, etc., sat on the boards of German corporations.

The Nazi effort failed, as they underestimated the Russian will to fight to the death. (Eighty percent of all German Army deaths were due to the Russian campaign.)

But those in New York were able to regroup and be first in the queue for the restructuring of German industry after the war and, ultimately, profited handsomely.

But most significantly, the idea of corporatist collectivism did not die. Even before the war, the same group of families and corporations had drawn up the plan for Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

Mister Roosevelt was a dyed-in-the-wool Wall Street man and a director of New York banks. In the 1930s and early 1940s, he created, as president, a revolving door that favoured large corporations, whilst the average American was consciously kept at the subsistence level through government entitlements.

The scam worked. Shortsighted Americans not only were grateful; they deified him for it.

Likewise, John Kennedy's New Frontier sought to revitalize the concept, as did Lyndon Johnson's Great Society: Give the little people entitlements that keep them little. Tax smaller businesses and create a flow of tax dollars to the elite industries, who, in turn, provide monetary favours to the political class.

The Green New Deal is merely the latest corporate collectivist scheme on the list.

Corporate collectivism can be defined as a system in which the few who hold the legal monopolies of finance and industry gain an overriding control over all others, and in so doing, systematically extract wealth from them.

Today, this system has become so refined that, although the average American has a flat screen TV and an expensive smartphone, he cannot raise $400 to cover an emergency that occurs in his life. He is, for all practical purposes, continually bankrupt, but still functioning in a zombie-like existence of continual dependency.

This, on the surface, may not seem all that dangerous, but those who cannot buy their way out of a small emergency are easily controlled. Just create an emergency such as an uber-virus and that fact will be illuminated quickly.

In order to maximise compliance in a population, maximise their dependence.

As stated above, this effort has been in play for generations. But it is now reaching a crescendo. It's now up to speed in most of the former Free World and those who hold the strings are ready for a major step forward in corporate collectivism.

In the coming year, we shall see dramatic changes appearing at a dizzying rate. Capital controls , migration controls, internal movement controls, tax increases, confiscation of assets and the removal of "inalienable" rights will all be coming into effect – so quickly that before the populace can even grasp the latest restrictions, new ones will be heaped on.

As this unfolds, we shall witness the erosion of the nation-state. Controls will come from global authorities, such as the UN, the IMF and the WEF. Organisations that have no formal authority over nations will increasingly be calling the shots and people will wonder how this is possible. Elected officials will increasingly become mere bagmen, doing the bidding of an unelected ruling class.

The changes that take place will be not unlike a blanket that is thrown over humanity.

The question then will be whether to, a) give in to this force, b) to fight it and most likely fall victim to it, or c) seek a means to fall outside the perimeter of the blanket.

* * *

Unfortunately most people have no idea what really happens when a government goes out of control, let alone how to prepare The coming economic and political crisis is going to be much worse, much longer, and very different than what we've seen in the past. That's exactly why New York Times best-selling author Doug Casey and his team just released an urgent video. Click here to watch it now .

[Jan 19, 2021] Viral #TrumpsNewArmy Video Is Liberals At Their Craziest And Scariest by Caitlin Johnstone

Caitlin Johnstone is wrong. It not about the danger of neofascism or "white supremasism" (BTW can Zionism be classified as a brand of White Supremacism and suppressed ?) per se. And not even about the new incarnation of the National Security State, which is definitely coming. Even in the current form the National Security State is able to crush any some movement in no time as there is not way one can organize such a movement without getting into crosshairs of FBI and other agencies.
This is actually about the level of fear of neoliberal elite and financial oligarchy instilled by Dec 6 events, which due to the collapse of neoliberal ideology in 2008 got into " The king is naked " situation in 2021. Neoliberal elite lost the legitimacy (aka "mandate from Heavens" in Chinese terminology) much like Soviet nomenklatura before the dissolution of the USSR. Neoliberal was unable to raise the standard of living of the population. Instead it provided the redistribution of wealth up ("accumulation by dispossession") and the decline of the standard of living for the majority of population (aka "deplorables"). That created the crisis of legitimacy and Dec 6 events should probably be viewed mainly under this angle. It looks like the majority of the crowd were from lower middle class (small business owners and such)
Jan 19, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

A new viral video calling on liberals to form "an army of citizen detectives" to gather information on Trump supporters and report their activities to the authorities has racked up thousands of shares and millions of views in just a few hours.

The hashtag #TrumpsNewArmy is trending on Twitter as of this writing due to the release of a horrifying video with that title from successful author and virulent Russiagater Don Winslow. As of this writing it has some 20 thousand shares and 2.6 million views, and the comments and quote-retweets are predominantly supportive.

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"On or before January 20th, Donald Trump will no longer be the Commander-in-Chief: he will lose control of the Army, Navy, Airforce, Marines, Special Forces and America's nuclear arsenal," Winslow's voice begins ominously. "On January 20th Donald Trump will become Commander-in-Chief of a different army: this army."

Viewers are then shown footage from Trump rallies while being told that they are looking at "radical extreme conservatives, also known as domestic terrorists".

"They are hidden among us, disguised behind regular jobs," Winslow warns.

"They are your children's teachers. They work at supermarkets, malls, doctor's offices, and many are police officers and soldiers."

Winslow talks about white supremacists and the Capitol riot, warning that Trump will continue escalating violence and fomenting a civil war in America.

"We have to fight back," Winslow declares.

"In this new war, the battlefield has changes. Computers can be more valuable than guns. And this is what we need now more than ever: an army of citizen detectives. I'm proposing we form a citizen army. Our weapons will be computers and cellphones. We, who are monitoring extremists on the internet and reporting our findings to authorities. Remember, before the Navy Seals killed Osama Bin Laden, he had to be found. He was found by a CIA analyst working on a computer thousands of miles away. It's up to you."

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The viral video is being loudly amplified by popular #Resistance accounts like Majid M Padellan (better known as Brooklyn Dad Defiant) with frighteningly paranoid and HUAC-like rhetoric.

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"#TrumpsNewArmy is VILE," one of Padellan's Twitter shares of the video reads. "And we KNOW who they are. They are our teachers. They are our neighbors. They are our police officers. They are EVERYWHERE. EXPOSE THEIR TREASON."

"Donald trump is on his way out," reads another .

"Good riddance. But his 'army' is still here, hiding amongst us. They are traitors. They are evil. And they MUST be rooted OUT."

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America," reads yet another . "But SOME people they pledged their allegiance ONLY to trump. These are dangerous traitors."

"After 9/11, we were told: If you see something, say something," reads still another .

"We have TERRORISTS in our midst. Some of us KNOW these people. It is our patriotic DUTY to expose them."

So if you were hoping that maybe liberals would chill out and get a little less crazy with Trump out of the White House, I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

This is as insane and scary as I have ever seen these people get, and I was in the thick of peak Russiagate hysteria. An aggressively manufactured push to get an army of citizens spying on each other calls to mind the Stasi informants of East Germany , the patriotism-fueled digital "digging" of the QAnon psyop, and the NatSec LARPing of Louise Mensch Twitter, all rolled into one great big ball of crazy.

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This comes out as we are being bombarded with mass media punditry from literal CIA veterans like Sue Gordon and Elissa Slotkin forcefully hammering home the message that domestic terror is the new frontier for combating violent extremism, meaning of course that new Patriot Act-like solutions will be needed . Winslow himself spent six years traveling and doing research for a novel about a former CIA operative , and if some government agency didn't recruit him during that period they clearly should have.

This will get frightening if it keeps up. Just as a relatively low-profile lefty blogger I routinely get liberals online falsely claiming I'm a Russian agent and saying they'll report me to the FBI, and that's without an aggressive campaign urging them to join a powerful digital army. The fact that Winslow stays very vague about what he means by "Trump's new army" and constantly conflates rank-and-file Trump supporters with white supremacist terrorists means people are effectively being pointed at all Trump supporters, especially when normal Trump rallies are what he points to in the video. If this takes off it can very quickly lead to a volunteer army of power-worshipping snitches against literally anyone who is critical of US foreign policy or the Democratic Party, whether they actually support Trump or not.

In fact just following the trending hashtag I'm noticing Twitter users saying this means targeting all Trump supporters, so clearly that is the message that's being absorbed.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-3&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1351490505394196481&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fjohnstone-viral-trumpsnewarmy-video-liberals-their-craziest-and-scariest&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

"Trumpers are pushing back so hard against this video because so many of them live in the dark, cloaked behind normal jobs and seemingly normal lives," Winslow tweeted in promotion of his project.

Well maybe that's because they are half the voting public, Don?

Winslow mixes in these generic comments about "Trumpers" with comments about "white supremacists" , about whom he tweets "1. We expose them. 2. We identify them. 3. We notify law enforcement. 4. We notify their employers."

Their employers.

This is just liberals being pushed toward targeting anyone who isn't ideologically aligned with them for destruction. I really, really hope it doesn't take off, because it is profoundly ugly. Please don't let the manipulators trick you into ripping each other to pieces, America. They're only pointing you at each other so you don't look at them.

* * *

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Fudomyo 2 hours ago

Hopefully things will settle down after the inauguration. There are a lot of normal people in the US who just want to get on with fixing their lives after all the economic damage done by the lock downs. This extreme political crap is getting really exhausting for everyone in the center. The number of people who are centrists well exceed the the polar extremes. Unfortunately the extremists get the lion's share of news coverage, so it makes it appear the country is filled with lunatics. If Biden is smart he won't alienate the center or he will lose a lot of support going into the mid-terms. A quiet period where people can actually start rebuilding their lives and the economy is desperately needed. I remain cautiously hopeful that once the political circus dies down, that could actually happen.

cankles' server 35 minutes ago

As Greenwald said, it's easy for the neocons to switch because the D's are now the party of "militarism, imperialism, and corporatism."

[Jan 19, 2021] The massive military buildup can be viewed as another step towards neofascism

Jan 19, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Zanon , Jan 19 2021 20:26 utc | 21

The U.S. seems to have gone completely crazy these day.

Two full divisions worth of soldiers are closing off Washington DC to 'protect' a mostly virtual inauguration from a non-existing threat.

26,000 National Guard members to secure Washington for inauguration

The FBI is investigating the loyalty of those troops as if it were really in doubt.

FBI vetting troops stationed in Washington ahead of Inauguration Day

On the massive military buildup = another drift towards fascism under the democrats, they have the media, military, police on top of congress, house and president. GOP will be so weak coming years, and they have themselves to blame for being so passive past years, in fact any dissent will not be heard coming years with Biden.

[Jan 19, 2021] Exceptionalist Conceit

Jan 19, 2021 | www.counterpunch.org

Exceptionalist Conceit

The first such hurdle was the longstanding American- exceptionalist conceit that, in the ironic title of Sinclair Lewis's dystopian 1935 novel, "It Can't Happen Here." The "it" in Lewis's title was authoritarian fascism, falsely deemed impossible in the United States during and since Lewis' time because of the supposedly strong hold here of democratic and constitutional principles and institutions. Such authoritarianism has long been falsely portrayed as beyond the pale of possibility in a nation whose media and political authorities regularly and absurdly call the "world's greatest democracy."

Apathy/Demobilization/"Inverted Totalitarianism"

A third barrier was a critical ingredient of what the late left political scientist Sheldon Wolin considered to be America's distinctive authoritarian "inverted totalitarianism" – the atomized demobilization of the populace. While what Wolin called the "classical totalitarian regimes" of fascist German and Soviet Russia aimed at the constant political mobilization of the populace, "inverted totalitarianism aims for the mass of the populace to be in a persistent state of political apathy. The only type of political activity expected or desired from the citizenry is voting. Low electoral turnouts are favorably received as an indication that the bulk of the populace has given up hope that the government will ever significantly help them." The second most common response to pleas to join popular movements against Trumpism-fascism (after "I'll vote/I voted against him") in my experience was a shrugging indifference to and/or disgust with any and all politics often combined with a sense that American political life is too ugly, boring, and/or impenetrable to merit attention.

No Real Left

Eighth, the continuing and longtime absence of any sophisticated, powerful, and relevant, many-sided Left of significance in late Neoliberal America is a significant part of the tragic equation. No such movement would have met the rise of Trump and Trumpism-fascism with four years of avoidance, denial, passivity, and diversion. There are many factors in play behind this pathetic portside weakness but two that have struck this writer and activist as particularly relevant alongside excessive localism and excessive identitarianism in the last four years are (i) the crippling holds of sectarianism (an almost pathological refusal to reach across tribal-ideological and organizational lines to form a united anti-fascist front) and (ii) single-issue silo politics whereby group A cares about the climate, group B cares about reproductive rights, group C cares about a higher minimum wages, group D cares about teachers' working conditions and so on.

Paul Street's new book is The Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and Politics of Appeasement .

[Jan 19, 2021] Larry Johnson- The CIA Has Become the KGB

Jan 19, 2021 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Larry Johnson: The CIA Has Become the KGB

My title may appear to be over the top, but hear me out. There was a time when the CIA, despite deep flaws and sloppy tradecraft, could be counted on to tell the President, regardless of political party, the truth. No longer. It is corrupt to the very top and now should be viewed as an enemy of the Republic.

The latest revelations from the Intelligence Community's Analytic Ombudsman described in a memo from DNI John Ratcliffe is beyond shocking. Rather than tell the truth about Chinese interference in the 2020 Presidential election, the CIA opted to quash intelligence that would have proven Donald Trump's claim that the Chinese not only interfered in the 2020 election, but played a hand in throwing the election to Joe Biden.

Here are the salient points of the DNI's memo:

The IC's Analytic Ombudsman issued a report . . . that includes concerning revelations about the politicization of China election influence reporting and of undue pressure being brought to bear on analysts who offered an alternative view based on the intelligence. . . .

Analytic Standard B requires the IC to maintain "independence of political considerations." This is particularly important during times when the country is, as the Ombudsman wrote, "in a hyper partisan state." However, the Ombudsman found that:

"China analysts were hesitant to assess Chinese actions as undue influence or interference. These analysts appeared reluctant to have their analysis on China brought forward because they tend to disagree with the administration's policies, saying in effect, I don't want our intelligence used to support those policies. This behavior would constitute a violation of Analytic Standard B: Independence of Political Considerations (IRTPA Section 1019).". . . .

"There were strong efforts to suppress analysis of alternatives (AOA) in the August [National intelligence Council Assessment on foreign election influence], and associated IC products, which is a violation ofTradecraft Standard 4 and IRTPA Section 1017.

National Intelligence Council (NIC) officials reported that Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials rejected NIC coordination comments and tried to downplay alternative analyses in their own production during the drafting of the NICA." . . . .

Additionally, the Ombudsman found that CIA Management took actions "pressuring [analysts] to withdraw their support" from the alternative viewpoint on China "in an attempt to suppress it. This was seen by National Intelligence Officers (NIO) as politicization,"

"There were strong efforts to suppress analysis of alternatives (AOA) in the August [National intelligence Council Assessment on foreign election influence], and associated IC products, which is a violation ofTradecraft Standard 4 and IRTPA Section 1017.

National Intelligence Council (NIC) officials reported that Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials rejected NIC coordination comments and tried to downplay alternative analyses in their own production during the drafting of the NICA."

Let me make this very simple--the CIA cooked the books because they did not want to produce the evidence that proved what the President has been saying since the election was true.

This is not a mistake. This is treason of the highest order.

[Jan 17, 2021] Big Tech and the Democratic Party Are Leading America to a Fascist Future by Robert Bridge

Notable quotes:
"... Although there may not be tanks on the streets and a dictator inciting crowds from his bully pulpit, the end result has been pretty much the same. ..."
"... it is important to put aside the notion that fascism is a purely right-wing phenomenon, complete with a chauvinistic demagogue haranguing a frenzied crowd. The new dictator on the block is not some fanatical Fuhrer, but rather Silicon Valley, the fountainhead of technological advancement and the formidable fortress of liberal ideology. In other words, fascism is an ideology that moves fluidly along the political spectrum, although some say the ideology grew out of European progressivism. ..."
"... Liberal Fascism ..."
"... Many years earlier, the late political theorist Hannah Arendt described the Nazi Party (which stands for, lest we forget, the 'National SOCIALIST German Workers' Party') as nothing more than "the breakdown of all German and European traditions, the good as well as the bad basing itself on the intoxication of destruction as an actual experience." That sounds like a pretty accurate description of the cancel culture mentality that has now gripped the 'progressive' left with an almost demonic possession. ..."
"... We are living Orwell's 1984. Free-speech no longer exists in America. It died with big tech and what's left is only there for a chosen few. ..."
"... Big Tech began its slide towards marked fascist tendencies thanks to one of the greatest hoaxes ever foisted upon the American public, known as Russiagate. One after another, Silicon Valley overlords were called before Congressional committees to explain "how and why Russian operatives were given free rein to tamper with 2016 U.S. election," in favor of the populist Donald Trump, no less. ..."
"... Strangely, violence has never shocked the progressive left, so long as the violence supported its agenda. ..."
"... While all forms of 'cancel culture' (which seems to be part of a move to build American society along the lines of the Chinese 'social credit system,' which rewards those who toe the party line, and punishes those who fall out of favor) are egregious and counterintuitive to American values, perhaps the most astonishing was the cancellation of Republican Senator Josh Hawley's book deal with Simon and Shuster. ..."
"... In conclusion, it would be a huge mistake for the Democrats to believe that they are safe from the same sort of corporate and government behavior that has now dramatically silenced the conservative voice across the nation. The United States has entered dangerous unchartered waters, and by all indications it would appear that the American people have inherited a 'soft' form of fascism. ..."
Jan 15, 2021 | www.strategic-culture.org

© Photo: REUTERS

Although there may not be tanks on the streets and a dictator inciting crowds from his bully pulpit, the end result has been pretty much the same.

Most Americans can probably still remember a time when U.S. companies were in business with one goal in mind – providing a product or service for profit. It was a noble idea, the bedrock of capitalism, in which everyone stood to gain in the process.

Today, the monopolistic powers now enjoyed by a handful of mighty corporations, which are no longer shy about declaring their political bent, have tempted them to wade into the deep end of the political pool with deleterious effects on democracy. Indeed, corporate power wedded to government is nothing less than fascism.

In presenting such a case, it is important to put aside the notion that fascism is a purely right-wing phenomenon, complete with a chauvinistic demagogue haranguing a frenzied crowd. The new dictator on the block is not some fanatical Fuhrer, but rather Silicon Valley, the fountainhead of technological advancement and the formidable fortress of liberal ideology. In other words, fascism is an ideology that moves fluidly along the political spectrum, although some say the ideology grew out of European progressivism.

Jonah Goldberg argued in his 2008 book, Liberal Fascism , that even before World War II "fascism was widely viewed as a progressive social movement with many liberal and left-wing adherents in Europe and the United States." Many years earlier, the late political theorist Hannah Arendt described the Nazi Party (which stands for, lest we forget, the 'National SOCIALIST German Workers' Party') as nothing more than "the breakdown of all German and European traditions, the good as well as the bad basing itself on the intoxication of destruction as an actual experience." That sounds like a pretty accurate description of the cancel culture mentality that has now gripped the 'progressive' left with an almost demonic possession.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=Strateg_Culture&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1347721302136729603&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.strategic-culture.org%2Fnews%2F2021%2F01%2F15%2Fbig-tech-and-democratic-party-leading-america-to-fascist-future%2F&siteScreenName=Strateg_Culture&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

It should be shocking to Republicans and Democrats alike that the Commander-in-Chief of the United States is banished from all of the main social media platforms – Twitter, Facebook and YouTube – denying him the ability to communicate with his 75 million constituents, or one half of the electorate. This is real and unprecedented violence being committed against the body politic and far more worrisome than any breach of federal property, as loathsome as such an act may be.

The Capitol building is, after all, ultimately a mere symbol of our freedoms and liberties, whereas the rights laid down in the U.S. Constitution – the First Amendment not least of all – are fragile and coming under sustained assault every single day. Why does the left refuse to show the same concern for an aging piece of parchment, arguably the greatest political document ever written, as it does for a piece of architecture? The answer to that riddle is becoming increasingly obvious.

We are living Orwell's 1984. Free-speech no longer exists in America. It died with big tech and what's left is only there for a chosen few.

This is absolute insanity! https://t.co/s2z8ymFsLX

-- Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) January 9, 2021

Big Tech began its slide towards marked fascist tendencies thanks to one of the greatest hoaxes ever foisted upon the American public, known as Russiagate. One after another, Silicon Valley overlords were called before Congressional committees to explain "how and why Russian operatives were given free rein to tamper with 2016 U.S. election," in favor of the populist Donald Trump, no less.

After this made for television 'dressing down', the Big Tech executives at Google, Facebook, Twitter and others got busy reconfiguring their software algorithms in such a way that thousands of internet creators suddenly lost not only a lifetime of hard work and their sustenance, but their voice as well. This is the moment that Big Tech and the Democrats began to really march in lockstep. A new dark age of 'McCarthyism' had settled upon the nation, which gave the left unlimited powers for blocking user accounts they deemed "suspicious," which meant anyone on the right. Now, getting 'shadow banned,' demonetized and outright banned from these platforms has become the new dystopian reality for those with a conservative message to convey. And the fact that the story of 'Russian collusion' was finally exposed as a dirty little lie did nothing to loosen the corporate screws.

Incidentally, as a very large footnote to this story, Big Tech and Big Business have not dished out the same amount of medieval-style punishment to other violators of the public peace. The most obvious example comes courtesy of Black Lives Matter, the Soros-funded social-justice movement that has wreaked havoc across a broad swath of the heartland following the death of George Floyd during an arrest by a white police officer.

Both BLM and Trump supporters believe they have a very large grudge to bear. The former believes they are being unfairly targeted by police due to the color of their skin, while the latter believes they are not getting fair treatment by the mainstream media due to 'Trump Derangement Syndrome', and possibly also due in part to their skin color. But at this point the similarities between BLM and Trump voters come to a screeching halt.

Taking it as gospel that America suffers from 'systemic racism' (it doesn't, although that is not to say that pockets of racism against all colors and creeds doesn't exist), dozens of corporations jumped on the woke bandwagon to express their support for Black Lives Matter at the very same time the latter's members were looting and burning neighborhoods across the nation. Strangely, violence has never shocked the progressive left, so long as the violence supported its agenda.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=Strateg_Culture&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-2&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1349419030352949249&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.strategic-culture.org%2Fnews%2F2021%2F01%2F15%2Fbig-tech-and-democratic-party-leading-america-to-fascist-future%2F&siteScreenName=Strateg_Culture&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

Here are just some of the ways the corporate world responded to charges that America was a racist cauldron ready to blow, as reported by The Washington Post: "Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, knelt alongside employees during his visit to a Chase branch. Bank of America pledged $1 billion to fight racial inequality in America. Tech companies have invested big dollars in Black Lives Matter, the Center for Policing Equity, Colin Kaepernick's Know Your Rights Camp and other entities engaged in racial justice efforts " And the list goes on and on.

Of course, private corporations are free to express their solidarity with whatever group they wish. The problem, however, is that these monopolistic monstrosities have an overwhelming tendency to pledge allegiance to liberal, progressive values, as opposed to maybe steering clear of politics altogether. Nowhere was Corporate America's political agenda more obvious than in the aftermath of the siege of the Capitol building on January 6, which led to the death of five people.

Corporate America missed a very good opportunity to keep quiet and remain neutral with regards to an issue of incredible partisan significance. Instead, it unleashed a salvo of attacks on Trump supporters, even denying them access to basic services.

Aside from the most obvious and alarming 'disappearing act,' that of POTUS being removed from the major social media platforms, were countless lesser names caught up in the 'purge.'

One such person is conservative commentator and former baseball star Curt Schilling, who says that AIG terminated his insurance policy over his "social media profile," which was sympathetic to Donald Trump, according to Summit News.

"We will be just fine, but wanted to let Americans know that @AIGinsurance canceled our insurance due to my "Social Media profile," tweeted Schilling.

"The agent told us it was a decision made by and with their PR department in conjunction with management," he added.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=Strateg_Culture&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-3&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1349209399877922819&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.strategic-culture.org%2Fnews%2F2021%2F01%2F15%2Fbig-tech-and-democratic-party-leading-america-to-fascist-future%2F&siteScreenName=Strateg_Culture&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

While all forms of 'cancel culture' (which seems to be part of a move to build American society along the lines of the Chinese 'social credit system,' which rewards those who toe the party line, and punishes those who fall out of favor) are egregious and counterintuitive to American values, perhaps the most astonishing was the cancellation of Republican Senator Josh Hawley's book deal with Simon and Shuster.

"We did not come to this decision lightly," Simon & Schuster said in a statement over Twitter. "As a publisher it will always be our mission to amplify a variety of voices and viewpoints: At the same time we take seriously our larger public responsibility as citizens, and cannot support Senator Hawley after his role in what became a dangerous threat."

The so-called "threat" was a photograph of Hawley raising a fist to the crowd that had assembled outside of the Capitol building before it had breached the security perimeter. It seems that corporations may now serve as judge, jury and executioner when it comes to how Americans behave in public. Is it a crime that Hawley acknowledged a crowd of supporters who were at the time behind the gates of the Capitol building? Apparently it is.

By the way, the name of the Hawley's book? 'The Tyranny of Big Tech'. How's that for irony?

In conclusion, it would be a huge mistake for the Democrats to believe that they are safe from the same sort of corporate and government behavior that has now dramatically silenced the conservative voice across the nation. The United States has entered dangerous unchartered waters, and by all indications it would appear that the American people have inherited a 'soft' form of fascism.

Although there may not be troops and tanks on the streets and a dictator inciting crowds from his bully pulpit, the end result has been pretty much the same: the brutal elimination of one half of the American population from all of the due protections provided by the U.S. Constitution due to an unholy alliance between corporate and government power, which is the very definition of fascism. Democrats, you may very well be next, so enjoy your victory while you still can.

[Jan 17, 2021] A note about "reactionary Republicans"

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Since you like Hitler analogies so much, dear Steven, why don't you contemplate the 'reactionary' aspect of those Germans who resisted, in the 1930s, the 'progress' of the National-Socialist movement. ..."
"... 'Reactionary' simply means 'opposing the change', and the changes instituted by global finance, aided by their faithful servants, your liberal comrades, -- those changes should be opposed by all decent citizens. ..."
Jan 17, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Mao Cheng Ji , Jan 17 2021 19:03 utc | 23

@steven t johnson: "reactionary Republicans"

Since you like Hitler analogies so much, dear Steven, why don't you contemplate the 'reactionary' aspect of those Germans who resisted, in the 1930s, the 'progress' of the National-Socialist movement.

'Reactionary' simply means 'opposing the change', and the changes instituted by global finance, aided by their faithful servants, your liberal comrades, -- those changes should be opposed by all decent citizens.

And they are opposed by all decent citizens, and especially by the American working class, which is why your liberal comrades have to resort to fascist methods: goebbelsian propaganda, censorship, blacklisting, police repression.

[Jan 17, 2021] Fascist Blindness - IRRUSSIANALITY

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... In the case of this Ukrainian nazi – of course they knew. They just hoped no one would notice. The reason she was given this appointment was because she is who she is. Ukraine is to be the anti-Russian state with an indoctrinated population – people like this young woman are part of that policy. ..."
Jan 17, 2021 | irrussianality.wordpress.com

peter moritz JANUARY 11, 2021 AT 3:53 PM

"Yale historian Timothy Snyder" In light of his opinions the appellation "historian" to this person can only be considered satire.

"The term 'fascist' is far too easily abused."

It is today used – like the term anti-semite, white supremacist, racist – to smear and or discredit anybody from the left or right one disagrees with or tries to disempower.

Jonathan Cook lays out how this works with regards to the left:

https://braveneweurope.com/jonathan-cook-how-the-left-is-being-manipulated-into-colluding-in-its-own-character-assassination

I have no problem arguing conservatives, if they actually clearly define what they mean by this term and find some points I agree with someone like Peter Hitchens:

"His view is that conservatism should embody a Burkean sense of public duty, conscience and the rule of law, which he sees as the best guarantee of liberty. Furthermore, this view holds a general hostility to hasty reforms and adventurism .

Hitchens takes a critical stance on many wars. He was opposed to the Kosovo and 2003 Iraq War, on the grounds that neither was in the interests of either Britain or the United States,[66] and opposes the war in Afghanistan.[67] He believes that the UK should never have joined in World War I, and is very critical of the view that World War II was "The Good War".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hitchens

Mikhail JANUARY 11, 2021 AT 3:56 PM

Synchronization. Just beforehand, Rachel Maddow propped Snyder's book on fascism.

Dmitry Babich made an excellent point about how the Biden crowd cheered the storming of the Ukrainian parliament which include some folks who qualify as fascists. In comparison, last week's DC protesting MAGA group didn't appear to be so fascist. I saw an Israeli flag among these protestors as well as some African-Americans.

A related great shot at establishment politico Ian Bremmer:

Mark Sleboda @MarkSleboda1 · Jan 10 "Calling for an insurrection to overthrow the legitimate outcome of a free and fair election is crime against the nation." - Unless the nation in question is #Ukraine in 2014 or some other state & govt not aligned with US hegemony. Then calling for an insurrection is kosher.

Quote Tweet ian bremmer @ianbremmer · Jan 10

Calling for an insurrection to overthrow the legitimate outcome of a free and fair election is crime against the nation. Yes, Trump only has another week in office. But he should still be impeached and convicted.

John Thuloe JANUARY 11, 2021 AT 6:45 PM

There are plenty of poseurs, blow-hards about. To be dangerous, there must be a leadership, an apparatus, discipline, and a substantial rank and file. And most importantly, all motivated by a creed, common beliefs that weld all into a force. Nothing like that exists.

But the good news is that behind the shrill loud-mouths of the Woke censorship bullies, fake news media, liberals, Democrats, burned out 'progressives – the On Duty paid for apparatchiks. Behind them is – nothing. No Party, no organizers, no apparatus at all. No store fronts for meetings, no stand by printers, no trained marshals. No seething masses burning with righteous fury ready to hit the streets. Nothing.

Sure, people are mad. But when you're mad at everything then that power is dissipated. And when you're not united by being For something then you don't amount to a hill of beans. The liberals are afraid that when their 'lockdown pandemic racket' runs out of gas, the public will turn on them with a vengeance. And they can expect no organized part of population to defend them. For a while, folks will be united on venting their fury at those that ride high now. Wait till the wheel turns. Grigory Matyunin JANUARY 11, 2021 AT 9:51 PM

It's like the misuse of the term 'conspiracy theorist' by people like Snyder, Harding and Applebaum. Anyone who merely points to the impropriety of Nuland/McCain's actions on the Maidan is pre-emptively dismissed by them as a conspiracy theorist. Yet the notion that Russia controls Trump through a pee tape, bewitched the Brits into voting for Brexit and was the sole force behind the Catalan independence movement is now axiomatic for worshippers of received wisdom. Guest JANUARY 12, 2021 AT 12:51 AM

In the case of this Ukrainian nazi – of course they knew. They just hoped no one would notice. The reason she was given this appointment was because she is who she is. Ukraine is to be the anti-Russian state with an indoctrinated population – people like this young woman are part of that policy.

Look around the world! We have seen that the west has no problem funding and supporting all sorts of disgusting groups and individuals if it meets their objectives.

yalensis JANUARY 12, 2021 AT 7:19 AM

Nice job, Professor! It's always good to see somebody point out these hacks egregious double standards.

I want people to start scientifically as possible defining their terms for political ideologies. Like, there is actually a legitimate use for the word "fascist". From what I understand, fascism is an actual political ideology and movement and should not be used simply as a derogatory. From what I understand, fascism does not necessarily include a racialist component, although it usually does (being based on nationalism).

Mussolini was a fascist. Hitler was a fascist too. (Nazism being a subset of the broader movement fascism?) Franco was a fascist. That Ukrainian lady you mentioned is an ideological fascist, more specifically a fucking Nazi.

Donald Trump -- is NOT a fascist. He is just a right-wing conservative, Murican-style!

peter moritz JANUARY 12, 2021 AT 10:07 AM

I have for years tried to find a concise definition of "Fascism", but only found a lot of disagreement.

Fascism is by some defined as a corporatism where the state and the industrial and financial capitalist elite have come to a complete nexus where the state protects within a framework of "ultra" nationalism those elites who in return follow and as well directly influence the policies. By this definition the USA could be called not a fascist state, but one with fascists tendencies as the nexus has been established to a great extend.

Some conservatives and libertarians find intellectual solace in pointing out that especially in Germany fascism developed as a "national socialism". A version that opposed the internationalism of the Marxist version espoused the German Communist party, and propagated an economic based antisemitism.
They are not wrong there, as socialism is not just the socialism or communism as defined by Marx, but as Marx himself pointed out in his critiques there are various kind of socialisms. ( https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm )

What they however ignore is Hitlers move under the guise of "socialism" to establish close ties with the German financial and Industrial leadership and the attempt of a "true" National Socialism came to an end with the Strasser Brothers breaking away and one being murdered in the Night of the Long Knives when Hitler destroyed any leftwing faction within the NSDAP.

Others like Paxton define define Fascism as a developmental process. This article here lays out some of the differences in interpreting the term: https://newrepublic.com/article/154042/failure-define-fascism-today

PaulR JANUARY 12, 2021 AT 10:20 AM

Fascism is not the only ideology which lacks clear definition. Try looking at the literature on liberalism – it's a mess (with good reason – many modern day 'liberals' are entirely at odds with classical liberals, neoliberals, etc, but they're all called liberal). The best recent scholarship can come up with is the idea that liberalism is a 'family of resemblances' or even that it's just whatever people who call themselves liberal happen to say it is at any given time and place. Conservatism is similarly poorly defined.

Lyttenburgh JANUARY 12, 2021 AT 9:18 PM

"I have for years tried to find a concise definition of "Fascism", but only found a lot of disagreement."

There's still definition provided by G. Dimitrov:

"Fascism is an open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, most imperialist elements of the finance capital

Fascism is not a supra-class power and not the power of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen proletariat over finance capital. Fascism*is* the rule of finance capital itself .

This is the organization of terrorist reprisals against the working class and the revolutionary part of the peasantry and intelligentsia. Fascism in foreign policy is chauvinism in its crudest form, cultivating zoological hatred of other peoples."

Defenders of Google, Twitter, Amazon et al saying "they CAN do that – they are PrIVaTe CoMpaNIeS!" – ha-ha!

Grigory Matyunin JANUARY 12, 2021 AT 3:01 PM

Absolutely, Paul. Comparing the neoconservative and paleoconservative traditions, for instance, reveals extraordinary divergences in conservative intellectual thought. Your recent book presents plenty of such contradictions.

Yet the lack of definitional clarity does not mean that any particular term can be thrown around as a polemical device or a catch-all form of abuse. Fascist ideologies differ between themselves, but they do have a relatively ubiquitous common denominator in being mass movements set upon utopian mass transformation relying upon extreme violence, as per the scholarship of Roger Griffin.

It's like right-of-centre political commentators who misuse the term 'Marxist' to describe modern identity politics, notwithstanding how clearly inappropriate that label is when analyzing a movement which has little commitment to class struggle.

Equally, while we may lack a one-size-fits-all definition of any given ideology, we can usually say with some confidence what it is not. In other words, while the fascism of OUN-B may differ remarkably from the fascism of Mussolini, it is sufficiently clear that these movements lack any ideological likeness with modern Russia.

yalensis JANUARY 12, 2021 AT 3:28 PM

From what I understand, one common denominator of genuine fascist movements is a cult of a national leader (Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Bandera). However, I am not sure that this factor is REQUIRED in order to be fascist. I imagine it is theoretically possible to have a fascist nation run by a committee or collegial leadership.

And the "Leader" factor is also not definitive in and of itself, because the Stalin period in the Soviet Union was also defined by a cult of a leader; and yet the Soviet Union was definitely not fascist, it was socialist.

In this case, I would say, two different systems (capitalistic fascism and Soviet-style socialism) showed, what evolutionary biologists call "convergent" traits.

For example, in the natural world, fishes and whales both have fins and live in the water; yet these two types of animals are not related to each other genetically (except going way back). This is "convergent" evolution.

Which leads me to another thought: Perhaps ideological movements can be classified by their historical genetics rather than a static "structuralist" definition. The difference between a Darwinian vs a Linnaeus approach? I think this method is also used to categorize religions, so might be appropriate also for political ideologies.

Just musing here, but I think it's important

Lyttenburgh JANUARY 12, 2021 AT 8:57 PM

"Outside of a particular time period (1920s to 1940s), I don't think that the term 'fascism' has a lot of meaning. "

What about:
– Spain under Franko.
– Greece under "black colonels"
– Genuine, NATO approved fascist parties working diligently and openly in the "Western democracies" throughout the period?

Lyttenburgh JANUARY 12, 2021 AT 10:57 PM

Also:

Remember VICE's breathless coverage of the "Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity" that propelled certain Ostrovsky to the upper echelons of the journalism and punditry? From their linked article:

"She also addressed a photo that was circulated of her online, showing her as one of a group of four women holding a flag emblazoned with a swastika while giving a Nazi salute. She claimed the image was an ironic Halloween photo, mocking the Kremlin narrative that Ukrainian nationalists were neo-Nazis."

Mikhail JANUARY 12, 2021 AT 11:50 PM

Later with Ostrovsky.

No surprise to see PC Bulgarian Ivan Kravtsev involved with that establishment org accepting her. At the Brit based openDemocracy venue, Kravtsev felt compelled to write an article on why China (in his opinion) is freer than Russia. Tom de Waal is a Kravstev fan.

Mikhail JANUARY 13, 2021 AT 12:02 AM

Related:

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-2&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1348676388052729861&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Firrussianality.wordpress.com%2F2021%2F01%2F11%2Ffascist-blindness%2F&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=474px

There're better academics posting at this threads. By academic, I'm referring to those who intellectually and knowledge wise aren't inferior to the aforementioned folks getting the accolades.

yalensis JANUARY 13, 2021 AT 7:13 AM

If she says it was just a Halloween costume, that means she is disowning or denying having Nazi views? That seems cowardly to me. I personally have more respect for Nazis who just come out and admit, "Yeah, I'm a Nazi." Of course, in that case, they would have to be willing to sacrifice the money and income from "respectable" bourgeois institutions.

james JANUARY 13, 2021 AT 12:18 AM

Yale historian Timothy Snyder – more like Yale historian – propagandist Timothy Snyder.. i figured this out on my own without having to be an academic to know this, but thank you paul for this article and confirming my viewpoint

David JANUARY 16, 2021 AT 12:18 AM

Snyder is such a fraud. His book Bloodlands is utter drivel filled with complete falsities – none of which substantiated with sources. "Yale historian" is clearly a meaningless title. But of course he gets called on for propaganda hit pieces like this or that ridiculous Agents of Chaos series on HBO.

[Jan 15, 2021] It turned out that a whole class of ships, on which America had pinned great hopes a couple of decades ago, turned out to be utterly incapable of combat

Jan 15, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Mao , Jan 15 2021 4:38 utc | 67

A major scandal is unfolding in the US naval community. It turned out that a whole class of ships, on which America had pinned great hopes a couple of decades ago, turned out to be utterly incapable of combat. What exactly are the problems with these ships? Why did they only show up now? What does the massive corruption in the United States have to do with what is happening?

Political events in the United States have overshadowed everything that happens in this country. Including one event related to the Navy, which would indeed have exploded.

We are talking about a whole type of warships, both already delivered to the US Navy, and those still under construction – the so-called Littoral combat ship (LCS) of the Freedom type. And it's not that they're useless. And not at the prohibitive cost. And not even that the gearboxes of the ship's main power plant (GEM) do not withstand the maximum stroke, and with the speed of 47 knots, which was the ridge of this project, he will never be able to walk – they also resigned themselves to this.

But at the end of 2020, it turned out that they generally cannot move faster than a dry cargo ship for more or less a long time. That is, it is not just scrapping metal; it is also almost stationary scrap metal.

https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2021/01/13/american-warships-of-one-class-turn-into-a-metal-scrub/

[Jan 13, 2021] What to do with big tech octopus

Jan 13, 2021 | www.unz.com

John Regan , says: January 12, 2021 at 2:22 pm GMT • 13.9 hours ago

@anarchyst hen made public utilities available for all (obviously without compensation to the owners). No more of the sad "private company" excuse, and no more billions into the pockets of criminals who hate us.

Also, make Dorsey, Zuckerberg, Pichai et al. serve serious jail time for election tampering if nothing else. Both to send out a clear warning to others, and for the simple decency to see justice served.

Of course this will not happen short of a French Revolution-style regime shift. But since (sadly) the same is equally true even for your extremely generous and modest proposal, I see no harm in dreaming a little bigger.

[Jan 13, 2021] The mob never wins. It is always led by the nose by well organised agents provocateur. See Epoch time video:

Jan 13, 2021 | www.unz.com

Faihtful , says: January 12, 2021 at 5:28 am GMT • 22.8 hours ago

The mob never wins. It is always led by the nose by well organised agents provocateur. See Epoch time video:


https://www.bitchute.com/embed/FrE27FTf11Q/

[Jan 11, 2021] It is inconceivable that any political party can survive in the US without the backing of the 'deep state' and first of all FBI and CIA.

Jan 11, 2021 | thesaker.is

John Hagan on January 11, 2021 , · at 5:49 am EST/EDT

Hi Ah,
That the US deep state has been terrorising parts of the world for many years my reaction before the election was to hope that Biden would win as I believed that would be the quickest destruction of the terrorist deep state rather than with Trump where I believed it would survive some time longer. It is inconceivable that any political party can survive in the US without the backing of the 'deep state'.

Of course this makes the nuclear option more likely yet democrats are more attached to their lives than many others since the profit motive looms larger.

Secondly the US owes the pension and social security systems so much money they do not have unless they print, print and more print and hope someone will buy their bonds (over 100 trillion for the next 'x' years). That is not going to happen. That is why both political parties will not endorse medicare for all or any further social security programmes. Those with money insurance industries et al will run away to Australia that has more gold than it knows what to do with the Chinese are now trying to buy Aussie gold mines. Wonder why?

https://youtu.be/_uxJ8JYnwAQ

To sum up the US population will experience some of the same terrorism tacticts the deep state exported to the rest of the world while the same population will wonder why it is happening to them just like some of the middle east countries wondered the same for the last 20 years. That the deep state and the army offer pensions and heathcare will not matter if the funds are not there.
What are the options for the citizens that always believed in capitalism and Jesus and were the single moral compass for the rest of humanity? After living in a Buddist country for many years I am not so certain.

[Jan 11, 2021] Is America's Future a Civil War, by Paul Craig Roberts -

Notable quotes:
"... The military would support whomever pays their salary and their pensions, i.e. the Establishment. However, as Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, the U.S. military, while possessing remarkable firepower when taken on directly and openly, is quite vulnerable. The U.S. military is essentially mercenaries. Mercenaries work for pay. Mercenaries are not willing to die for a cause. You can't spend money if you're dead. ..."
Jan 11, 2021 | www.unz.com

As a person who grew up in the glorious aftermath of World War II, it never occurred to me that in my later years I would be pondering whether the United States would end in civil war or a police state. In the aftermath of the stolen presidential election, it seems a 50-50 toss up.

There is abundant evidence of a police state. One feature of a police state is controlled explanations and the suppression of dissent. We certainly have that in abundance.

Experts are not permitted forums in which to challenge the official position on Covid.

Teachers are suspended for giving offense by using gender pronouns.

Recording stars are dropped by their recording studios for attending the Trump rally. Parents ratted on by their own children are fired from their jobs for attending the Trump rally. https://www.rt.com/usa/512048-capitol-riot-employees-fired/ Antifa is free to riot, loot, intimidate and hassle, but Trump supporters are insurrectionists.

White people are racists who use hateful words and concepts, but those who demonize whites are righting wrongs.

Suppression of dissent and controlling behavior are police state characteristics. It might be less clear to some why dictating permissible use of language is police state control. Think about it this way. If your use of pronouns can be controlled, so can your use of all other words. As concepts involve words, they also can be controlled. In this way inconvenient thoughts and expressions along with accurate descriptions find their way into the Memory Hole.

With the First Amendment gone, or restricted to the demonization of targeted persons, such as "the Trump Deplorables," "white supremacists," "Southern racists," the Second Amendment can't have much life left. As guns are associated with red states, that is, with Trump supporters, outlawing guns is a way to criminalize the red half of the American population that the Establishment considers "deplorable." Those who stand on their Constitutional right will be imprisoned and become cheap prison labor for America's global corporations.

Could all this lead to a civil war or are Americans too beat down to effectively resist? That we won't know until it is put to the test.

Are there clear frontlines? Identity Politics has divided the people across the entire country. The red states are only majority red. It is tempting to see the frontiers as the red center against the blue Northeast and West coasts, but that is misleading. Georgia is a red state with a red governor and legislature, but there were enough Democrats in power locally to steal the presidential and US senate elections.

Another problem for reds is that large cities -- the distribution centers -- such as Atlanta, Detroit, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles -- are in blue hands as are ports and international airports. Effectively, this cuts reds off from outside resources.

What would the US military do? Clearly, the Joint Chiefs and the military/security complex are establishment and not anti-establishment Trumpers. With the soldiers themselves now a racial and gender mix, the soldiers would be as divided as the country. Those not with the Establishment would lack upper level support.

Where are the youth and younger adults? They are in both camps depending on their education. Many of the whites who went to university have been brainwashed against themselves, and regard white Americans as "systemic racists" or "white supremacists" and feel guilt. Those who did not go to university for the most part have experienced to their disadvantage the favoritism given to people of color and have resentment.

What about weapons? How can the reds lose when guns are a household item and blues would never dirty themselves by owning one? The answer is that unlike the War of Northern Aggression in the 1860s, today the weapons in the hands of the military are devastating compared to those in the hands of the public. Unlike in the past, it is impossible for a citizens' militia to stand against the weapons and body armor that the military has. So, unless the military splits, the reds are outgunned. Never believe that the Establishment would not release chemical and biological agents against red forces. Or for that matter nuclear weapons.

What about communications? We know for an absolute fact that the tech monopolies are aligned with the Establishment against the people. So much so that President Trump, in the process of being set-up for prosecution, has been cut off from communicating with his supporters both in social media and email.

The American Establishment is doing to President Trump exactly what it did to Ukrainian President Yanukovych in Washington's orchestrated "Maidan Revolution," called "the Revolution of Dignity" by the liars at Wikipedia, and precisely what it did to Chavez, Maduro, and would like to do to Putin.

Suppose an American civil war occurs. How is it likely to play out? Before investigating this, first consider how the Establishment could prevent it by bringing the red states to its defense. The Trump supporters are the only patriots in the American population. They tend to wear the flag on their sleeve. In contrast, blue state denizens define patriotism as acknowledging America's evils and taking retribution on those white racists/imperialists who committed the evils. In blue states, riots against the "racist system" result in defunding the police. If the Antifa and Black Lives Matter militias were sicced on the Biden regime, red state patriots might see "their country" under attack. It is possible that the "Proud Boys" would come to Biden's defense, not because they believe in Biden but because America is under attack and he is "our president." Alternatively, an Antifa attack on the Biden regime could be portrayed as an unpatriotic attack on America and be used to discourage red state opposition to the police state, just as "Insurrection" has resulted in many Trump supporters declaring their opposition to violence. In other words, it is entirely possible that the patriotism of the "Trump Deplorables" would split the red state opposition and lead to defeat.

Assuming that the Establishment is too arrogant and sure of itself or too stupid to think of this ploy, how would a civil war play out? The Establishment would do everything possible to discredit the case of the "rebels." The true rebels, of course, would be the Establishment which has overthrown the Constitutional order, but no media would make that point. Controlling the media, the Establishment, knowing of the patriotism of its opponents, would portray the "rebels" as foreign agents seeking to overthrow American Democracy.

The "foreign threat" always captures the patriot's attention. We see it right now with Trump supporters falling for the disinformation that Switzerland and Italy are behind the stolen election. Previously, it was Dominion servers in Germany and Serbia that did the deed.

On whose head will the Establishment place the blame for "the War Against America"? There are three candidates: Iran, China, and Russia. Which will the Establishment choose?

To give Iran credit conveys too much power to a relatively small country over America. To blame Iran for our civil war would be belittling.

To blame China won't work, because Trump blamed China for economically undermining America and Trump supporters are generally anti-China. So accusing the red opposition with being China agents would not work.

The blame will be placed on Russia.

This is the easy one. Russia has been the black hat ever since Churchill's Iron Curtain speech in 1946. Americans are accustomed to this enemy. The Cold War reigned from the end of World War II until the Soviet Collapse in 1991. Many, including retired American generals, maintain that the Soviet collapse was faked to put us off guard for conquest.

When the Establishment decided to frame President Trump, the Establishment chose Russia as Trump's co-conspirator against American Democracy. Russiagate, orchestrated by the CIA and FBI, ensured for three years that Trump was accused in the Western media of being in cahoots with Russia. Despite the lack of any evidence, a large percentage of the American and world population was convinced that Trump was put into office by Putin somehow manipulating the vote.

The brainwashing was so successful that three years of Trump sanctions against Russia could not shake the Western peoples back into factual reality.

With Russia as the historic and orchestrated enemy, whatever happens in the United States that can be blamed elsewhere will be blamed on Russia. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, and former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes have already associated "Trump's insurrection" with Russia. https://www.rt.com/russia/512071-capitol-violence-consequences-fear/

Suppose that an American civil war becomes intense. Suppose that the Establishment's propaganda against Russia becomes the reigning belief as propaganda almost always becomes, how can the Establishment not finish the insurrection threat by attacking the country responsible? The Establishment would be trapped in its own propaganda. Emotions would run away. Russia would hear threats that would have to be taken seriously.

You can bet that Biden's neocon government will be egging this on. American exceptionalism. American hegemony. Russia's fifth column, the Atlanticist Integrationists, who wish absorption into the degenerate and failing Western World, will echo the charges against Russia. This would make the situation a serious international incident with Russia as the threatened villain.

What would the Kremlin do? Would Russia's leaders accept yet another humiliation and false accusation? Or will the anger of the Russian people forever accused and never stood up for by their own government force the Kremlin into awareness that Russia could be attacked at any moment.

Even if the Kremlin is reluctant to acknowledge the threat of war, what if another of the numerous false warnings of incoming ICBMs is received. Unlike the past, is it believed this time?

The stolen election in America, the emerging American Police State, more vicious and better armed than any in the past, could result in American chaos that could be a dire threat to the Russian Federation.

What Trump and his supporters, and perhaps the Kremlin, do not understand is that real evidence no longer counts . The Establishment makes up the evidence that it needs for its agendas. Consider how easy it was for the Capitol Police to remove barriers and allow some Antifa mixed in with Trump supporters into the Capitol. This was all that was required to create a "Trump led insurrection" that terminated the presentation of evidence of electoral fraud and turned the massive rally of support for Trump into a liability. Trump now leaves the presidency as an "insurrectionist" and is set up for continued harassment and prosecution.

As I previously wrote, the stolen election and its acceptance abroad signifies the failure of Western democracy. The collapse of the Western world and its values will affect the entire world.


Joe Stalin , says: January 10, 2021 at 5:16 pm GMT • 23.4 hours ago

How long did it take for the mighty USA military to restore electric utilities in the face of insurgency in Iraq?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/gg-Zd193j60?feature=oembed

No member of the State wants to be picked off one by one, be it military, cops, leadership or functionaries.

What has been overlooked in the debate over the combat potential of violent extremists is the diffusion of something much more rudimentary and potentially more lethal: basic infantry skills. These include coordinated small-team tactical maneuvers supported by elementary marksmanship. The diffusion of such tactics seems to be underway, and it may generate serious concerns for U.S. security policy in the future if ignored.

https://warontherocks.com/2018/02/shock-of-the-mundane-the-dangerous-diffusion-of-basic-infantry-tactics/

Imagine if fuel pipe lines to urban areas were hit, railroad tracks hit, water processing facilities hit; the vision of an easy victory over Red America would quickly come home to the city dwellers.

Harry Huntington , says: January 10, 2021 at 6:02 pm GMT • 22.6 hours ago
@Joe Stalin /p>

Elections in the US are not about picking winners. They are about making voters complicit in governance by their having voted. The most recent election failed to make the Red voters "complict" because there was no transparency and everyone believes there was fraud. No election with mail in voting in the US will every work because everyone will assume fraud.

In a nation as large as the US with as much concentrated city living, logistics are a nightmare. The next time the lights go out, you may wonder. When your grocery chain runs out of meat, you may wonder. When sewers in your city keep breaking, you may wonder. Thus truly scares me.

Vidi , says: January 10, 2021 at 6:13 pm GMT • 22.4 hours ago

today the weapons in the hands of the military are devastating compared to those in the hands of the public

True enough. However, the weapons and the ammunition don't magically appear; they need to be manufactured somewhere, and those places (and/or their suppliers) can be destroyed.

TG , says: January 10, 2021 at 6:19 pm GMT • 22.3 hours ago

I must disagree. There will be no "civil war" in the United States. The establishment controls the levers of power and all communications and all organized structures. There may be a bunch of disaffected citizens, but they will remain a disorganized mob. Any apparent emergent rival for power will be ruthlessly suppressed, deplatformed, villified, or co-opted. The working class has been effectively divided and will waste its energy fighting itself over crumbs ('diversity').

Disorganized mobs do not fight civil wars.

No, the fate of the United States will be the sort of chaotic autocracy we see in places like Mexico and Brazil. Verging on being a failed state, the rich will nonetheless live lives of great luxury secure in their walled estates. Meanwhile the average person will be crushed into poverty, criminal gangs will flourish, and there will be a tension between the central police and local gangs, but gangs are rarely organized enough to truly challenge centralized states, and life will muddle on. There will be little social cohesion and no real trust of central authorities, but that only matters if you want a strong and unified society. The rich will do fine.

On the other hand, the overall national power will decline, and other powers like China (which for all its flaws has not declared war on the working class, nor does it routinely excuse or celebrate incompetence in leadership) will rise and take its place both on the world stage and as the cutting edge of science and culture.

Wyatt , says: January 10, 2021 at 6:48 pm GMT • 21.8 hours ago
@Vidi

And the people making them don't tend to want those weapons used against their friends and neighbors.

Notsofast , says: January 10, 2021 at 8:03 pm GMT • 20.6 hours ago

to me the biggest outcome of this faux coup/insurrection is the splintering of the republican party. with this schism the trump "populists" have been cleanly pared off of the party and thrown overboard and the remaining party will meekly do the bidding of the neocon deep state that now totally controls both of these sock puppet parties. we will now see both parties calling for a unification of our "indispensable nation". more than likely some false flag will provide the necessary impetus to bury the hatchet and focus us all on our new/old enemy. the only hope i see is an outside chance that so many republicans have been redpilled that the party becomes the new whigs and fades into obscurity, leaving room for new parties to rise from the ash. the dems are ripe for a schism themselves with aoc champing at the bit to kick the boomers to the curb and the bernie bros finally realizing that three card monty is a rigged game. i would love to see the destruction of both of these hopelessly corrupt parties but the deep state cthulhu has its tentacles thoroughly wrapped around our poor planet and anything emerging out of this toxic mess would most likely be even worse. the situation reminds me of voltaire's candide and his sage advice to cultivate your garden.

Anon [912] Disclaimer , says: January 10, 2021 at 8:26 pm GMT • 20.2 hours ago

I'd advise the young to develop a "plan B". Pick another country you find bearable amd study it. Find out what jobs are in demand there. Develop those skills in your spare time (computers, electricians, mechanics, etc.). Practice their language an hour or two per week with online resources/dvd's/books. Research their immigration laws and perhaps contact their embassy.

If it gets really awful for whites here, you may be able to take your family some place more hospitable. Hopefully none of this will be neccessary and the rhetoric will tone down. Trump personally really got under the left's skin. Don't umderestimate Hillary's supporters influence here. They were ticked off. The Obama's too. Perhaps they will calm down a notch now. Have a plan B though young whites.

Citizen of a Silly Country , says: January 10, 2021 at 11:17 pm GMT • 17.4 hours ago

Another insightful article by PCR. However, I must somewhat disagree on some points.

What would the US military do?

The military would support whomever pays their salary and their pensions, i.e. the Establishment. However, as Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, the U.S. military, while possessing remarkable firepower when taken on directly and openly, is quite vulnerable. The U.S. military is essentially mercenaries. Mercenaries work for pay. Mercenaries are not willing to die for a cause. You can't spend money if you're dead.

Think of the Troubles in Ireland.

The Establishment absolutely can deliver a punch to an identifiable opponent, but it can't take a punch. Low level violence directed at officers and politicians would bring them to their knees.

Controlling the media, the Establishment, knowing of the patriotism of its opponents, would portray the "rebels" as foreign agents seeking to overthrow American Democracy.

I agree that they will try. However, I suspect that PCR is underestimating how little faith many whites have in the media.

The Establishment will never be more powerful than it is today. They have inherited institutions, the people to man those institutions and a generally functioning economy. Basically, they stole the keys to car that they didn't create. But the Establishment run those institutions and economy into ground. They will slowly start to show cracks.

Whites need to stay low, start forming small groups and begin preparing for the openings that will come.

Dr. Robert Morgan , says: January 11, 2021 at 1:34 am GMT • 15.1 hours ago

The racial right has been fantasizing about a civil war since forever, but I can't see it. Too many people have too much to lose, there's no real desire for blood, and the people are anyway too soft to initiate or withstand the violence real war would unleash upon them. Further, and in stark contrast to the SJWs and antifa, the few racially conscious whites who fantasize about this are mostly too old to make good soldiers. Also, just like the "God emperor" himself, Trumpers are some of the stupidest people on the face of the earth, largely down with their own enslavement, nauseatingly fond of "law and order", sporting "Blue Lives Matter" badges, etc. Despite being preyed upon by blacks and browns for decades now, they still refuse to become racist. Most of them are Bible thumpers who really believe that race is just skin color, that all are equal before their imaginary friend called God, and that Israel is America's greatest ally. Then too, vast numbers of whites work for the government or its many offshoots such as education, law enforcement, the military, and the defense industry. Civil war would mean they'd be revolting against themselves.

Will America become a police state? In case you haven't noticed, Americans already live in a police state, and have for decades. PCR should know this as well as anyone, as he was part of it during the Reagan years. America is an open-air prison Americans built themselves, and they rat each other out and betray each other to keep themselves ideologically in line. When someone white is doxxed and fired for having bad thoughts, who do you think does the enforcing? For the most part, it's other white people. Fake president and China asset Biden is just the new warden.

Harold Smith , says: January 11, 2021 at 3:45 am GMT • 12.9 hours ago

As a person who grew up in the glorious aftermath of World War II, it never occurred to me that in my later years I would be pondering whether the United States would end in civil war or a police state. In the aftermath of the stolen presidential election, it seems a 50-50 toss up.

In a very meaningful sense we already have a "police state." Why do we have a police state? Because our masters realize that they can't run the whole world from anything resembling a constitutional republic (as the Founders and Framers envisioned it). It's the agenda for complete world domination and control that's driving the domestic oppression. As they continue to squander everything of value on the agenda and take more risks, etc., while the corruption and rot continue to take a toll and the country crumbles, the boot will need to come down ever harder on the neck.

And please stop kidding yourself about Trump. It wasn't for the benefit of Joe and Jill Sixpack that he seized Syrian oilfields, tried to start a war with Iran, tried to overthrow the Maduro government in Venezuela, tried to stop Nord Stream 2, started a trade war with China, pulled out of all the nuclear treaties, etc. Trump wasn't just fully onboard with the agenda, he pursued it enthusiastically.

If Trump's nuclear brinkmanship and aggressive foreign policies aren't promptly reversed, the U.S. may end as a pile of nuclear ash. Comments coming out of Moscow recently seem to suggest that Russia is finally losing its patience with interminable U.S. hostility and may soon start responding more forcefully to U.S./NATO provocations (and Biden's tough talk on Russia isn't helping matters any).

Neither Russia, China nor Iran are going to surrender to the USraeli empire and start taking orders, so either the U.S. "government" must back off and accept a multipolar world or WW3 is still on the table, even by accident.

tanabear , says: January 11, 2021 at 5:45 am GMT • 10.9 hours ago

From Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War.

The Civil War in Corcyra

"So savage was the progress of this revolution, and it seemed all the more so because it was one of the first which had broken out. Later, of course, practically the whole of the Hellenic world was convulsed, with rival parties in every state – democratic leaders trying to bring in the Athenians, and oligarchs trying to bring in the Spartans. In peacetime there would have been no excuse and no desire for calling them in, but in time of war, when each party could always count upon an alliance which would do harm to its opponents and at the same time strengthen its own position, it became a natural thing for anyone who wanted a change of government to call in help from outside.

So revolutions broke out in city after city, and in places where the revolutions occurred late the knowledge of what had happened previously in other places caused still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal, expressed by an elaboration in the methods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities in revenge. To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings . What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character ; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defence. Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect. To plot successfully was a sign of intelligence, but it was still cleverer to see that a plot was hatching. If one attempted to provide against having to do either, one was disrupting the unity of the party and acting out of fear of the opposition. In short, it was equally praiseworthy to get one's blow in first against someone who was going to do wrong, and to denounce someone who had no intention of doing any wrong at all. Family relations were a weaker tie than party membership , since party members were more ready to go to any extreme for any reason whatever. These parties were not formed to enjoy the benefits of the established laws, but to acquire power by overthrowing the existing regime ; and the members of these parties felt confidence in each other not because of any fellowship in a religious communion, but because they were partners in crime. If an opponent made a reasonable speech, the party in power, so far from giving it a generous reception, took every precaution to see that it had no practical effect.

As the result of these revolutions, there was a general deterioration of character throughout the Greek world . The simple way of looking at things, which is so much the mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist. Society had become divided into two ideologically hostile camps , and each side viewed the other with suspicion. As for ending this state of affairs, no guarantee could be given that would be trusted, no oath sworn that people would fear to break; everyone had come to the conclusion that it was hopeless to expect a permanent settlement and so, instead of being able to feel confident in others, they devoted their energies to providing against being injured themselves."

Just another serf , says: January 11, 2021 at 6:04 am GMT • 10.6 hours ago

Whether civil war as we may imagine it, or something equally unappealing to our every day lives, something bad is about to happen.

I'm curious though, regarding what I do believe was unprecedented election fraud. How is it possible, after watching the Georgia State Farm arena video, that the President of the United States, with all the power that office should hold, could not force the woman identified in that video, one Ruby Freeman, to answer questions about what we saw? Ruby Freeman was never questioned as far as I can find. How is this possible? Nothing makes sense. Before we begin killing one another, can we do two things; 1. Interrogate Ruby Freeman and 2. Interrogate the killer of Ashli Babbit?

Zarathustra , says: January 11, 2021 at 6:24 am GMT • 10.2 hours ago

Little bit feverish article. And I do have to say no.
Civil war can happen only after hyperinflation accompanied with lawlessness.
And that will happen only if US looses its international position.
Everything depend now on Germany.
If Germany joins China Russia camp than US as a world leader will not mean anything anymore.
China now is courting Europe intensively. Particularly is courting Germany.
Nothing is set yet.
So everybody can relax.
.
Biden is out of his mind. In his speech he said that he wants to increase minimum wage and reestablish unions. That could be a little help also.

shylockcracy , says: January 11, 2021 at 6:58 am GMT • 9.7 hours ago

People living in the core areas of Ziocorporate globalism, like the US/EU, remain mostly oblivious about the nature of their ruling regime than those living in the direct periphery of globalist power. Take Colombia for an example, like Mexico's, all its presidents are subservient to US Ziocorporate power. Last one, a Nobel peace prize winner under whose pre-presidential stint as "Defense" minister oversaw the US-serving Colombian military's systematic massacre of tens of thousands of lower class Colombian youths who were then disguised as guerrillas to cash in rewards paid US Plan Colombia dollars, proceeded, now as president, to negotiate the disarmament of the actual guerrillas under the Obama/Biden regime's orders. Massmurder and massacres maintained an average level.

Then, in 2018, right after the Trumpet, a shamelessly pro-US regime, even for Colombian standards, took over and massacres and massmurder picked right up again, to an average of 2 or 3 per week, with exploding cocaine production even for Colombia standards as well, and extreme political polarisation, and all the while the Ziocorporate mother ship in Washington, with its Qtard and MAGA bullshit, looked the other way except to accuse Venezuela of being undemocratic and of human rights violations.

If Americans weren't so stupid and daydreaming like fucktards that they live in "muh democracy/republic" instead of the Ziocorporate conglomerate regime that rules over them, they could take a clue or two from their own regime's foreign policy, not only did Trumpet do things like transferring $400 billion in weapons to ISIS/al-Qaeda royal Salafi patrons in Ziodi Wahhabia, he doubled-down on the Obama/Biden policy of Venezuela "is a national security threat to muh democracy and freedom"; to start pondering about the kind of manipulation and radicalisation Ziocorporate agents Trump/Republicans and Biden/Democrats have in store for them. Cointelpro certainly mutates far faster than Covid-1984.

Happy New World Order and Great Reset.

shylockcracy , says: January 11, 2021 at 7:17 am GMT • 9.4 hours ago
@catdog i-deep state" character is actually the opposite of:

"White House teams up with Google to build coronavirus screening site"
https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/13/white-house-teams-up-with-google-to-build-coronavirus-screening-site/

What do Qtarts and the like need to realise this simple, evident facts? That the Trumpet himself comes on national TV telling you all "I and the Democrats have been playing divide and conquer with you dumbfucks for 4 years"?

Feeling that anti-deep state MAGA magick yet?

Miro23 , says: January 11, 2021 at 7:25 am GMT • 9.2 hours ago

The American Establishment is doing to President Trump exactly what it did to Ukrainian President Yanukovych in Washington's orchestrated "Maidan Revolution," called "the Revolution of Dignity" by the liars at Wikipedia, and precisely what it did to Chavez, Maduro, and would like to do to Putin.

What Trump and his supporters, and perhaps the Kremlin, do not understand is that real evidence no longer counts . The Establishment makes up the evidence that it needs for its agendas.

Their playbook "Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals" by Saul D. Alinsky, makes it clear that it's necessary to play dirty. This covers all aspects of their Regime Change projects and the current US project surely isn't any different.

It's a cocktail of lies, fabrications, subversion, threats, blackmail, false friendships – in fact any means to advance themselves.

For example: From Alinsky – "Means and Ends" His take on morality:

Rule 10) You do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments.

Rule 11) Goals must be phrased in general terms like "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity", "Of the Common Welfare, "Pursuit of Happiness" or "Bread and Peace".

So yes, this is why the most unpatriotic Patriot Act is called the Patriot Act and they operate from patriotic sounding places like the American Enterprise Institute.

If traditional America is going to get anywhere in the upcoming conflict they have to get used to playing by the same rules – difficult for them – but they have to do it. It's inevitably going to be a dirty war.

Abdul Alhazred , says: January 11, 2021 at 8:01 am GMT • 8.6 hours ago

Point of order- Russia is not the historic enemy, but the orchestrated one, rather it was the Soviet Union which is the historic enemy, as the sponsors of the destruction of Russia are behind the destruction of America.

Carlos22 , says: January 11, 2021 at 8:09 am GMT • 8.5 hours ago

We are already in a police state and you can kiss goodbye to the 1st and 2nd amendment soon as free speech becomes hate speech just like they did in Europe.

So this site and many others in the alt news universe will soon be gone.

There's not going to be a civil war as the current generation of young people are too weak and distracted and have been brainwashed into hating themselves.

There's a big elephant in the room and wild card that's been missed too and that's the new covid vaccines who's long term effects on health are unknown.

Vaccines need to be studied for about 10 years before their safety can be guaranteed.

If tens / hundreds of millions are willing to be injected with a new untested genetic engineered substance that could make them disabled or kill them in 5 years to save them against something with a 99% survival rate what does that tell you about the mental state of the Population?

The US as you once knew it is finished it's just that many are still in denial or haven't realized it yet.

noname27 , says: Website January 11, 2021 at 8:34 am GMT • 8.1 hours ago

I see no civil war in the USA. I see no organisation amongst the people in order to carry it out. They have no leader, they have no Hannibal, Boadicea or Adolf to rally them together for a major insurrection against The Beast Empire. Unless of course something is brewing secretly.

A French style form of resistance, as previously mentioned in these comments, also takes a lot of planning and organisational skills, and I see no inkling of that taking place amongst American patriots.

I also believe many do not realise how serious the matter is, they still, being bogged down in irrelevant party politics.

If however a large swathe of the police and US Military including officers were to desert their corrupt masters, things would look very different and a civil war could happen.

Ilya G Poimandres , says: January 11, 2021 at 8:39 am GMT • 8.0 hours ago

The civil was has been on since Crossfire Hurricane, the usurpers of the constitution simply kept it cold because they thought they could enforce their tyranny silently.

And if Trump surrenders then they would have been proven right, at least for the leadership fight.

Biden will likely launch a war because he already has his bay of pigs with his graft, and will need a moonshot for the misdirection.

I don't think they can fight half the nation (and the military will split), and Russia at the same time, so the only question is on whom the war will be launched. I still think the odds are higher that it will be a civil war, but the Russia option looms strong for sure.

TKK , says: January 11, 2021 at 9:39 am GMT • 7.0 hours ago

The US military is the most "woke" diverse incompetent organization in America.

Remember- contractors do all the heavy lifting "in theater"- from cooking to plumbing to firefighting to IT to combat.

This knowledge is hidden from view- kept on the down low.I only know because my brother has worked in Iraq and Afghanistan for KBR for the past 15 years. I have seen him accumulate well over Half a million in cash. What does he do? He makes sure the troops have water and food. He is in logistics. For the past decade I have heard hundreds if not thousands of stories of the jaw dropping incompetence, insouciance and laziness of the American military.

Rank-and-file Americans, indeed no one, talks about this very real infrastructure that props up every dumb, overweight enlisted. About 4 contractors to every enlisted.

Most of the contractors in theater are from Eastern Europe and sub Sahara Africa. If they were given orders to release biological or chemical weapons on the American populace, as long as the huge checks were hitting their account they would do it in a heartbeat

More than the military- fear the shadow military that knows the systems, does the work .. And will do whatever it is asked as long as they are paid.

Their mother doesn't live here.

Everywhere we turn, diversity and hiring people from the "other" never works out.

*** Side note: My brother revealed that when blacks came back from their R&R after the George Floyd insanity, most of them became more aggressive and entitled. Unable to do their work because they could not stop going to report others for incidence of racism.

This includes the American black contractors and enlisted.

These are dumb young black men and women who are making $92,000 a year to move pallets around. If they were asked to stop calling in sick every day, they would run to report their supervisor for-

Racism.

Many whites have lost their lucrative positions or been subject to discipline for having the audacity to ask blacks to come to work.

It's over. It's too far gone.

[Jan 11, 2021] Under neoliberalsm the checks and balances have been replaced with (Bank) checks and (Bank) balances

Jan 11, 2021 | turcopolier.typepad.com

We are about to participate in "The Great Experiment V. 2.0" in my opinion. This decides which of the Georges, Washington and Orwell, is right. My money is on Orwell for a reason I will tell you later.

...The checks and balances have been replaced with (Bank) checks and (Bank) balances. The richest men in the world are overseeing this experiment which is going global quicker than you can say"Google". They are enabled by the University academics who as Raymond Asquith once observed are always prepared to provide an intellectual justification for vile acts if the price is right and journalists will laud said acts to the heavens as decent, moral doings if they want a paycheck next week from their masters.

The Legislature is bought. The Executive is bought. The Supreme Court are ninnies...

... And you enabled all this yourselves. When you applauded the Patriot Act. When you cheered at the vilification of muslims, "sand niggers", "rag heads". When you justified the use of torture. When you masturbated watching targeting videos of drone strikes on Afghans. When you credulously watched fantasies on television about "Irans nuclear threat". When you listened and watched uncritically (or perhaps with secret pleasure) as the media lied to you breathlessly about the President disporting himself on a urine soaked bed with Russian hookers. Where was your sense of outrage then? Every time you deny the humanity and human rights of anyone, no matter how vile they be, you are destroying your own rights.

[Jan 10, 2021] Marxist definition of fascism

Jan 10, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Francis , Jan 10 2021 19:21 utc | 36

Georgi Dimitrov. The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism

Comrades, fascism in power was correctly described by the Thirteenth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.
...
Fascism is not a form of state power "standing above both classes -- the proletariat and the bourgeoisie," as Otto Bauer, for instance, has asserted. It is not "the revolt of the petty bourgeoisie which has captured the machinery of the state," as the British Socialist Brailsford declares. No, fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen-proletariat over finance capital. Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm

[Jan 09, 2021] By banning Trump and his supporters, Google and Twitter are turning the US into a facsimile of the regimes we once condemned by Scott Ritter

When neoliberal ideology is crumbling and the US neoliberal empire is in trouble, more tight censorship is logical step for neoliberal elite, who does not care and never believed in democracy for prols in any case. They are Trotskyites and their ideology is neoliberalism aka "Trotskyism for the rich". Which like was the case with Bolshevism in the USSR means that it is neo-feudalism for everybody else.
I never heard that feudal were concerned about freedom of speech for "deplorable". Only for their own narrow circle.
Also the stability of the society is often more important then individual freedoms. That's why in time of war, the press is forced to publish only official propaganda. So it is naive to expect that in crisis, and the US society is currently in crisis, freedom of speech would be respected. It will not. And Trump ban while cynical and illogical makes perfect sence for neoliberal oligarchy.
The problem is that the US elite has not plan other the kicking the neoliberal can down the road. And they intentionally polarized the society by promoting identity politics as a way to preserve thier power and split masses into warring ethic or other groups.
Jan 09, 2021 | www.rt.com

Tech companies were once the primary tools of US "soft power" used to overthrow authoritarian regimes by exporting 'digital democracy'. Now they employ the same tactics of suppression as those regimes to silence dissent at home.

The permanent suspension of President Trump's Twitter account, carried out unilaterally and devoid of any pretense of due process or appreciation of the First Amendment rights of Donald Trump, represents a low moment in American history. Trump's ban was followed by a decision by Google to de-platform Parler.com, a social media alternative to Twitter favored by many of Trump's supporters. Apple also gave Parler a "24 hour warning" asking it to provide a detailed moderation plan. Twitter, Google, Facebook (who also banned Trump) and the political supporters of President-elect Joe Biden cite concerns that the content of the president's Twitter account, along with exchanges among pro-Trump users of Parler, constituted an "incitement of violence" risk that justified the actions taken.

In the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol by protesters seemingly motivated by the words of President Trump, there is legitimate justification for concern over the link between political violence and social media. But if history has taught us anything, the cure can be worse than the disease, especially when it comes to the issue of constitutionally protected freedom of speech.

This danger is illustrated by the actions of the former First Lady Michelle Obama who has publicly called for tech companies like Twitter and Facebook to permanently ban Trump from their platforms and enact policies designed "to prevent their technology from being used by the nation's leaders to fuel insurrection." The irony of the wife of the last American President Barack Obama, who weaponized so-called digital democracy to export "Western democratic values" in the struggle against authoritarian regimes, to turn to Twitter to release her message of internet suppression, is striking. The fact that neither Michelle Obama nor those who extoll her message see this irony is disturbing.

The Obama administration first sought to use 'digital democracy', the name given to policies which aim to use web-based social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter as vehicles to enhance the organization and activism of young people in repressive regimes to achieve American policy objectives of regime change, during the 2009 Iranian presidential election. US 'digital democracy' efforts anchored a carefully orchestrated campaign to promote the candidacy of Mir Hossein Mousavi. These efforts included a phone call from a US State Department official, Jared Cohen, to executives at Twitter to forgo a scheduled maintenance period and keep the lines in and out of Iran open, under the premise that it was essential to make sure that digital messages sent by Iranian dissidents got out to an international audience. Digital democracy became privatized when its primary architect, Jared Cohen, left the State Department in September 2010 to take a new position with internet giant Google as the head of 'Google Ideas' now known as 'Jigsaw'. Jigsaw is a global initiative 'think tank' intended to "spearhead initiatives to apply technology solutions to problems faced by the developing world." This was the same job Cohen was doing while at the State Department.

Cohen promoted the notion of a "digital democracy contagion" based upon his belief that the "young people in the Middle East are just a mouse click away, they're just a Facebook connection away, they're just an instant message away, they're just a text message away" from sufficiently organizing to effect regime change. Cohen and Google were heavily involved the January 2011 demonstrations in Egypt, using social networking sites to call for demonstrations and political reform; the "Egyptian contagion" version of 'digital democracy' phenomena was fueled by social networking internet sites run by Egyptian youth groups which took a very public stance opposing the Mubarak regime and calling for political reform.

The Iranian and Egyptian experiences in digital democracy-inspired regime change represent the nexus of the weaponization of social media by tech giants such as Twitter and Google, and the US government, which at the time was under the stewardship of Barack Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden. The fact that both the Iranian and Egyptian efforts failed only underscores the nefarious nature of this relationship. The very tools and methodologies used by Iranian and Egyptian authorities to counter US-sponsored "digital democracy" – suppression through de-platforming – have now been taken up by Twitter, Google, and the political allies of Joe Biden to silence Donald Trump and his supporters from protesting an election they believe was every bit as "stolen" as the 2009 Iranian presidential election that gave birth to 'digital democracy' in the first place.

In a recently published report addressing the issue of internet freedom, Freedom House, a US government-funded non-profit, non-governmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on democracy, political freedom, and human rights, observed that internet connectivity "is not a convenience, but a necessity." Virtually all human activities, including political socialization, have moved online. This new 'digital world', the report noted, "presents distinct challenges for human rights and democratic governance" with "State and nonstate actors shape online narratives, censor critical speech, and build new technological systems of social control."

Freedom House was one of the supporters of 'digital democracy' in Iran and has been highly critical of the actions by Iranian authorities to shut down and otherwise control internet connectivity inside Iran. It noted that such tactics are indicative of a system that is "fearful of their own people and worr[ies] that they cannot control the information space." In its report, Freedom House wrote that "when civic organizing and political dissent overflow from the realm of social media onto the streets dictators shut down networks to choke off any calls for greater democracy and human rights."

In July 2019, the US 2nd District Court of Appeals ruling on Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump determined that President Trump's Twitter account "bear[s] all the trappings of an official, state-run account," meaning that the First Amendment governed the conduct of the account. As such, "the First Amendment does not permit a public official who utilizes a social media account for all manner of official purposes to exclude persons from an otherwise open online dialogue because they expressed views with which the official disagrees."

By banning Trump from their platform, the unelected employees of Twitter have done to the president of the United States what he was accused of doing in Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump. If it was a violation of First Amendment-protected free speech for Trump to exclude persons from an otherwise open online dialogue, then the converse is obviously also true.

The notion that Trump's tweets somehow represented a "clear and present danger" that required suppression is not supported by the law. In 1919 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote the majority opinion in Schenck v. United States , a case which examined the limits of free speech protections under the First Amendment, and famously observed that "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic [t]he question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent."

Holmes' opinion in Schenck was later limited by the Supreme Court in its 1969 decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio , which replaced the "clear and present danger" standard with what is known as "imminent lawless action," which holds that speech is not protected if it is likely to cause violation of the law "more quickly than an officer of the law reasonably can be summoned." By suppressing the social media expressions of Donald Trump and his supporters, Twitter, Facebook, and Google – egged on by the political supporters of Joe Biden – appear to have unilaterally adopted the "clear and present danger" standard which deviates from the constitutionally-mandated norms, as established by Supreme Court precedent, that govern the protection of speech in America.

Political speech is not just a human right – in America, it is an essential constitutionally guaranteed freedom. When the political supporters of Joe Biden, along with the unelected heads of media giants such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google, actively collaborate to silence the ability of Donald Trump and the tens of millions of Americans who support him to express themselves on social media, they become no better than the authoritarian regimes they once sought to remove from power.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ' SCORPION KING : America's Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.' He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf's staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter

See also

With unilateral censorship of a sitting US president, Big Tech has proven it's more powerful than any government Big Tech giants want to prove they are 'American gods'. Anyone watching the watchers? Tech oligarchs at Apple & Google are 'major obstacles' for Trump-friendly platform to arise – liberal studies scholar to RT Parting is such tweet sorrow... A fond farewell to Donald Trump's Twitter feed

[Jan 05, 2021] The Democrats Have Stolen the Presidential Election by Paul Craig Roberts

Notable quotes:
"... It is difficult to know or to ensure that the ballots are actual ballots from registered voters. For example in the early hours of the morning of November 4 large ballot drops occurred in Michigan and Wisconsin that wiped out Trump's lead. State officials have reported that people not registered -- probably illegals -- were permitted to vote. Postal service workers have reported being ordered to backdate ballots that suddenly appeared in the middle of the night after the deadline. These techniques were used to erase Trump's substantial leads in the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia. ..."
"... Digital technology has also made it easy to alter vote counts. US Air Force General Thomas McInerney is familiar with this technology. He says it was developed by the National Security Agency in order to interfere in foreign elections, but now is in the hands of the CIA and was used to defeat Trump. Trump is considered to be an enemy of the military/security complex because of his wish to normalize relations with Russia, thus taking away the enemy that justifies the CIA's budget and power. ..."
"... The military/security complex favors the disunity that the Democrat Party and media have fostered with their ideology of Identity Politics. ..."
"... I would take it a little further and say that voting by mail is a method of vote fraud. The supposed safeguards are easily circumvented, as some whistleblowers have illustrated with ballots being brought forth in large numbers after election day without postmarks and postal workers being ordered to stamp them with acceptable postmarks. ..."
"... Eisenhower is always lauded for his MIC warning. Frankly he ticks me off. Thanks for the warning AFTER you were in some position to mitigate. ..."
"... the most likely source of fraud that is hard to detect, is ballot harvesting. This should be outlawed as it violates the idea of a secret ballot. Somebody comes to the home of a disinterested voter and makes sure he votes (of course they will never admit to hounding the person) and "helps" them with the ballot. If the voter cannot be cajoled into voting the correct way, you merely throw his ballot in the trash. ..."
"... Living in an urban setting I often had to visit apartment buildings. Without fail, there was always a pile of undeliverable mail in the lobby under the mailboxes. ..."
"... His farewell address was just flapdoodle; it wasn't really dredged up till the 70s. Eisenhower spent eight years spreading tripwires and mines and then said "Watch out." Thanks buddy. ..."
"... As the German newspaper editor Udo Ulfkotte revealed in his book, Bought Journalism, the European and US media speak with one voice -- the voice of the CIA. The very profitable and powerful US military/security complex needs foreign enemies. ..."
"... inventive creative new ways to deceive.. first it was election machines, then mail in votes. ..."
"... The phrase "there's no evidence" is just a public commitment to ignore any evidence, no matter how blatant or obvious. ..."
"... Paper ballots as ascribed by Tulsi Gabbard legislation is the only safe option for elections. Kudos to Tulsi! ..."
"... Everyone knew about the potential for voter fraud to occur, but the entire system is corrupt, including Trump who has allowed the massive corruption within the system that was present when he entered office to persist and grow because he is a wimpy, spineless, coward, that was too afraid to make any waves and take the heat that he promised his voters. ..."
"... Why anyone voted for Trump in 2020 confounds me. I voted for him in 2016 and he has turned out to be one of the worst presidents in history. ..."
"... Trump in his cowardess and dishonesty knew that the ailing economy would harm his chances of being re-elected, so he allowed the health scare scamdemic to occur and destroy the livelihoods, lives, and businesses of hundreds of millions of Americans because he is a psychopath. Trump did not do what he promised. Trump made America worse than it has ever been since the end of slavery. ..."
"... Trump has also demanded the extradition of Assange after telling his voters that he loved wikileaks. Trump is a two-faced, lying, fraud. It has been his pattern. He consistently supports various groups and people like Wikileaks, Proud Boys, and others and panders to them and voters and tells people that he loves them, and then every time without fail when the heat is on, Trump says," I really don't know anything about them." ..."
"... "I know nothing." Trump saying "I know nothing." defines his presidency and who he is as a person, a spineless, pandering, corrupt, two-faced, narcissist, loser, and wimp! ..."
Nov 12, 2020 | www.unz.com

139 COMMENTS

Paul Craig Roberts' Interview with the European magazine Zur Zeit ( In This Time ):

https://zurzeit.at/index.php/die-demokraten-haben-die-praesidentenwahl-gestohlen/

English Translation:

A few months ago it looked like the re-election of Trump was almost certain, but now there was a close race between Trump and Biden? What happen during the last months?

In the months before the election, the Democrats used the "Covid pandemic" to put in place voting by mail. The argument was used that people who safely go to supermarkets and restaurants could catch Covid if they stood in voting lines. Never before used on a large scale, voting by mail is subject to massive vote fraud.

There are many credible reports of organized vote fraud committed by Democrats. The only question is whether the Republican establishment will support challenging the documented fraud or whether Trump will be pressured to concede in order to protect the reputation of American Democracy.

For those influenced by a partisan media that is denying the massive fraud that occurred, here is an overview of the elements of the fraud and the legal remedies. https://www.unz.com/article/of-color-revolutions-foreign-and-domestic-the-first-72-hours/

It is difficult to know or to ensure that the ballots are actual ballots from registered voters. For example in the early hours of the morning of November 4 large ballot drops occurred in Michigan and Wisconsin that wiped out Trump's lead. State officials have reported that people not registered -- probably illegals -- were permitted to vote. Postal service workers have reported being ordered to backdate ballots that suddenly appeared in the middle of the night after the deadline. These techniques were used to erase Trump's substantial leads in the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia.

Digital technology has also made it easy to alter vote counts. US Air Force General Thomas McInerney is familiar with this technology. He says it was developed by the National Security Agency in order to interfere in foreign elections, but now is in the hands of the CIA and was used to defeat Trump. Trump is considered to be an enemy of the military/security complex because of his wish to normalize relations with Russia, thus taking away the enemy that justifies the CIA's budget and power.

People do not understand. They think an election has been held when in fact what has occurred is that massive vote fraud has been used to effect a revolution against red state white America. Leaders of the revolution, such as Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are demanding a list of Trump supporters who are "to be held accountable." Calls are being made for the arrest of Tucker Carlson, the only mainstream journalist who supported President Trump.

In a recent column I wrote:

"Think what it means that the entirety of the US media, allegedly the 'watchdogs of democracy,' are openly involved in participating in the theft of a presidential election.

"Think what it means that a large number of Democrat public and election officials are openly involved in the theft of a presidential election.

"It means that the United States is split irredeemably. The hatred for white people that has been cultivated for many years, portraying white Americans as "systemic racists," together with the Democrats' lust for power and money, has destroyed national unity. The consequence will be the replacement of rules with force."

Mainstream media in Europe claim, that Trump had "divided" the United States. But isn`t it actually the other way around, that his opponents have divided the country?

As the German newspaper editor Udo Ulfkotte revealed in his book, Bought Journalism , the European and US media speak with one voice -- the voice of the CIA. The very profitable and powerful US military/security complex needs foreign enemies. Russiagate was a CIA/FBI successful effort to block Trump from reducing tensions with Russia. In 1961 in his last address to the American people President Dwight Eisenhower warned that the growing power of the military/industrial complex was a threat to American democracy. We ignored his warning and now have security agencies more powerful than the President.

The military/security complex favors the disunity that the Democrat Party and media have fostered with their ideology of Identity Politics. Identity politics replaced Marxist class war with race and gender war. White people, and especially white heterosexual males, are the new oppressor class. This ideology causes race and gender disunity and prevents any unified opposition to the security agencies ability to impose its agendas by controlling explanations. Opposition to Trump cemented the alliance between Democrats, media, and the Deep State.

It is possible that the courts will decide who will be sworn into office at January 20, 2021. Do you except a phase of uncertainty or even a constitutional crisis?

There is no doubt that numerous irregularities indicate that the election was stolen and that the ground was well laid in advance. Trump intends to challenge the obvious theft. However, his challenges will be rejected in Democrat ruled states, as they were part of the theft and will not indict themselves. This means Trump and his attorneys will have to have constitutional grounds for taking their cases to the federal Supreme Court. The Republicans have a majority on the Court, but the Court is not always partisan.

Republicans tend to be more patriotic than Democrats, who denounce America as racist, fascist, sexist, imperialist. This patriotism makes Republicans impotent when it comes to political warfare that could adversely affect America's reputation. The inclination of Republicans is for Trump to protect America's reputation by conceding the election. Republicans fear the impact on America's reputation of having it revealed that America's other major party plotted to steal a presidental election.

Red state Americans, on the other hand, have no such fear. They understand that they are the targets of the Democrats, having been defined by Democrats as "racist white supremacist Trump deplorables."

The introduction of a report of the Heritage Foundation states that "the United States has a long and unfortunate history of election fraud". Are the 2020 presidential elections another inglorious chapter in this long history?

This time the fraud is not local as in the past. It is the result of a well organized national effort to get rid of a president that the Establishment does not accept.

Somehow you get the impression that in the USA – as in many European countries democracy is just a facade – or am I wrong?

You are correct. Trump is the first non-establishment president who became President without being vetted by the Establishment since Ronald Reagan. Trump was able to be elected only because the Establishment thought he had no chance and took no measures to prevent his election. A number of studies have concluded that in the US the people, despite democracy and voting, have zero input into public policy.

Democracy cannot work in America because the money of the elite prevails. American democracy is organized in order to prevent the people from having a voice. A political campaign is expensive. The money for candidates comes from interest groups, such as defense contractors, Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the Israel Lobby. Consequently, the winning candidate is indebted to his funders, and these are the people whom he serves.

European mainstream media are portraying Biden as a luminous figure. Should Biden become president, what can be expected in terms of foreign and security policy, especially in regard to China, Russia and the Middle East? I mean, the deep state and the military-industrial complex remain surely nearly unchanged.

Biden will be a puppet, one unlikely to be long in office. His obvious mental confusion will be used either to rule through him or to remove him on grounds of mental incompetence. No one wants the nuclear button in the hands of a president who doesn't know which day of the week it is or where he is.

The military/security complex needs enemies for its power and profit and will be certain to retain the list of desirable foreign enemies -- Russia, Iran, China, and any independent-inclined country in Latin America. Being at war is also a way of distracting the people of the war against their liberties.

What the military/security complex might not appreciate is that among its Democrat allies there are some, such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who are ideological revolutionaries. Having demonized red state America and got rid of Trump (assuming the electoral fraud is not overturned by the courts), Ocasio-Cortez and her allies intend to revolutionize the Democrat Party and make it a non-establishment force. In her mind white people are the Establishment, which we already see from her demands for a list of Trump supporters to be punished.

I think I'm not wrong in assuming that a Biden-presidency would mean more identity politics, more political correctness etc. for the USA. How do you see this?

Identity politics turns races and genders against one another. As white people -- "systemic racists" -- are defined as the oppressor class, white people are not protected from hate speech and hate crimes. Anything can be said or done to a white American and it is not considered politically incorrect.

With Trump and his supporters demonized, under Democrat rule the transition of white Americans into second or third class citizens will be completed.

How do you access Trump's first term in office? Where was he successful and where he failed?

Trump spent his entire term in office fighting off fake accusations -- Russiagate, Impeachgate, failure to bomb Russia for paying Taliban to kill American occupiers of Afghanistan, causing Covid by not wearing a mask, and so on and on.

That Trump survived all the false charges shows that he is a real person, a powerful character. Who else could have survived what Trump has been subjected to by the Establishment and their media prostitutes. In the United States the media is known as "presstitutes" -- press prostitutes. That is what Udo Ulfkotte says they are in Europe. As a former Wall Street Journal editor, I say with complete confidence that there is no one in the American media today I would have hired. The total absence of integrity in the Western media is sufficient indication that the West is doomed.


Twodees Partain , says: November 12, 2020 at 7:21 pm GMT • 1.0 days ago

Never before used on a large scale, voting by mail is subject to massive vote fraud.

I would take it a little further and say that voting by mail is a method of vote fraud. The supposed safeguards are easily circumvented, as some whistleblowers have illustrated with ballots being brought forth in large numbers after election day without postmarks and postal workers being ordered to stamp them with acceptable postmarks.

It really seems to me that there would be no democrat majorities in Congress or in so many state legislatures without vote fraud.

Ann Nonny Mouse , says: Website November 12, 2020 at 7:42 pm GMT • 1.0 days ago

So fraud is needed to protect the reputation of American democracy. Only fraud can! Thanks, PCR!

endthefed , says: November 12, 2020 at 7:53 pm GMT • 24.0 hours ago
@Notsofast

Eisenhower is always lauded for his MIC warning. Frankly he ticks me off. Thanks for the warning AFTER you were in some position to mitigate.

MarkinLA , says: November 12, 2020 at 9:37 pm GMT • 22.2 hours ago

Worse than the fraud available with vote by mail is the voting of people normally who don't bother to vote. Think of how stupid and uninformed that average American voter is. Now realize how much more stupid and uninformed the non-voter is, only now he votes.

However, the most likely source of fraud that is hard to detect, is ballot harvesting. This should be outlawed as it violates the idea of a secret ballot. Somebody comes to the home of a disinterested voter and makes sure he votes (of course they will never admit to hounding the person) and "helps" them with the ballot. If the voter cannot be cajoled into voting the correct way, you merely throw his ballot in the trash.

Curmudgeon , says: November 12, 2020 at 9:43 pm GMT • 22.1 hours ago

I have little doubt that there have been massive "irregularities", particularly in the so-called battleground states, that are at play in "stealing" the election.

...The favourite phrase these days is "no evidence of wide spread voter fraud". Let's break that down. Only 6 states have been challenged for vote fraud. In the big scheme of things, 6 states is not wide spread, even if there is massive vote fraud within those 6 states. That the vote fraud is not widespread, implies that some vote fraud is acceptable, and that the listener should ignore it. Last and most importantly, in the narrowest of legalistic terms, testimony or affidavits are not evidence. Testimony and affidavits become evidence when supported by physical evidence. An affidavit with a photograph demonstrating the statement would be evidence.

Another phrase is something like "election officials say they have seen no evidence of voter fraud". I have yet to hear a reporter challenge the "seen no evidence of " part of the statement, regardless of the subject, by asking if the speaker had looked for any evidence. They won't, because they know damn well no one has.

That is how the liars operate. Not so different from Rumsfeld's "plausible deniability".

Beavertales , says: November 12, 2020 at 10:21 pm GMT • 21.5 hours ago

Living in an urban setting I often had to visit apartment buildings. Without fail, there was always a pile of undeliverable mail in the lobby under the mailboxes.

The envelopes were mostly addressed to people who had moved out or died. If ballots were sent to these people based on incorrect voter rolls, then these too would likely have been left sitting on the floor or on a ledge for anyone to take.

It doesn't take a leap of faith to know what a Trump-hating leftist would do when no one is looking. This moral hazard was intentionally created by Dems, who know that urban dwellers are transient and lean left politically.

Franz , says: November 12, 2020 at 10:54 pm GMT • 21.0 hours ago
@endthefed

Eisenhower is always lauded for his MIC warning. Frankly he ticks me off. Thanks for the warning AFTER you were in some position to mitigate.

Ike's a mystery. Why did he NOT question Harry Truman's commitments to NATO, the UN, and all that rubbish? Ike was a WWII guy. He knew Americans hated the UN in 1953 as much as they hated the League of Nations after WWI. But he let it all slide and get bigger.

His farewell address was just flapdoodle; it wasn't really dredged up till the 70s. Eisenhower spent eight years spreading tripwires and mines and then said "Watch out." Thanks buddy.

endthefed , says: November 12, 2020 at 11:08 pm GMT • 20.7 hours ago
@Bragadocious

Well, agree on your points however, on the other side of the ledger, he never understood the stupidity of the Korean war (that he could have ended) and majorly up-ramped CIA activities in all manner of regime change (bay of pigs anyone?). Almost a direct path to our foreign policy now (and now domestic policy)

Notsofast , says: November 12, 2020 at 11:28 pm GMT • 20.4 hours ago
@Bragadocious

He did deploy the military assistance advisory group to Vietnam in 1955. This is considered the beginning of U.S. involvement in the war. This allowed the French to moonwalk out the back door leaving us holding the bag. In fairness this was Johnson's war however. Eisenhower did cut the military budget as a peace dividend to fund interstate system and other domestic projects. In today political spectrum he would be considered a flaming liberal.

Louis Hissink , says: November 13, 2020 at 5:30 am GMT • 14.4 hours ago

Hi PCR

As the German newspaper editor Udo Ulfkotte revealed in his book, Bought Journalism, the European and US media speak with one voice -- the voice of the CIA. The very profitable and powerful US military/security complex needs foreign enemies.

What intrigues me is the ultimate political goal of the UN and the WEF when they anticipate a single global government centered at the UN and the absence of nation-states.

So what is the MIC going to do when there are no existential threats of competing nation-states? Or will the MIC re-engineer religious wars between the various religious groups, secular and theological? It seems the aspirations of the WEF and its fellow travellers preclude the occurrence of future armed conflicts.

Of course one needs capitalistic economies to produce the ordnance and materiels for the engineered social factions to war with each other. Yet if the Greens have their way, there will be no mining period.

More likely is the possibility that none of them actually understand what they are doing. As Nassim Taleb is alleged to have remarked, 99% of humans are stupid.

anonymous [284] Disclaimer , says: November 13, 2020 at 5:35 am GMT • 14.3 hours ago

The total absence of integrity in the Western media is sufficient indication that the West is doomed.

It's because Western media is completely under the control of Jews, the world's foremost End Justifies Means people. The Fourth Estate has become the world's most powerful Bully Pulpit. There are still a few good ones though, brave souls they are: Kim Strassel of WSJ, Daniel Larison of The American Conservative , Neil Munro of Breitbart.

The rest are more or less lying scums, including everyone on NYTimes, WSJ, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, MSNBC, Fox News (minus Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo), The Economist , and let's not forget the new media: Google, Facebook, Twitter. The world would be a much better place without any of them.

The Real World , says: November 13, 2020 at 5:44 am GMT • 14.1 hours ago
@Beavertales -- with either vote flipping on machines or having the totals that paper ballot scanners tabulate adjust via a pre-programmed algorithm. Many elections have already been stolen this way.

But, in the vein of what you mention is this fascinating article. I urge everyone to read it. He spills the beans in detail. https://nypost.com/2020/08/29/political-insider-explains-voter-fraud-with-mail-in-ballots/

Imagine hundreds of those people around the country over decades. There must be scads of illegitimate office holders all over. It's horrendous

Alfred , says: November 13, 2020 at 5:51 am GMT • 14.0 hours ago

Nancy Pelosi claims that Biden's victory gives the Democrats a "MANDATE" to alter the economy as they see fit with 50.5%. This proves that Biden will NOT represent everyone – only the left! I have warned that this has been their agenda from day one. Now, three whistleblowers from the Democratic software company Dominion Voting Systems, alleging that the company's software stole 38 million votes from Trump. There are people claiming that Dominion Voting Systems is linked to Soros, Dianae Finesteing, Clintons, and Pelosi's husband. I cannot verify any of these allegations so far.

We are at the Rubicon. Civil War is on the other side. There should NEVER be this type of drastic change to the economy from Capitalism to Marxism on 50.5% of the popular vote. NOBODY should be able to restructure the government and the economy on less than 2/3rds of the majority. That would be a mandate. Trying to change everything with a claim of 50.5% of the vote will only signal, like the Dread Scot decision, that there is no solution by rule of law. This is the end of civilization and it will turn ugly from here because there is no middle ground anymore. As I have warned, historically the left will never tolerate opposition.

Democrats Claim Mandate to Alter the Economy & 3 Whistleblowers from Software Company Allege they stole 38 million votes from Trump | Armstrong Economics

Priss Factor , says: Website November 13, 2020 at 5:56 am GMT • 13.9 hours ago

DEMOCRATS TURN MENACING AS FRAUD FALLS APART

https://www.bitchute.com/embed/WMA7DXLDgzBy/

Just another serf , says: November 13, 2020 at 6:18 am GMT • 13.6 hours ago

Yes, the theft is blatant. But what are you, us, going to do about it? We really can't do much as the Office of the President Elect requires us to wear masks. For our safety.

animalogic , says: November 13, 2020 at 6:35 am GMT • 13.3 hours ago
@Curmudgeon

"in the narrowest of legalistic terms, testimony or affidavits are not evidence. Testimony and affidavits become evidence when supported by physical evidence. " Correct – but they also can become evidence by verbal testimony. ie "I saw the defendant hit the victim with a rock"

Anon [115] Disclaimer , says: November 13, 2020 at 6:55 am GMT • 12.9 hours ago

Not only have they stolen the election but when Joe Biden and other democrats claim that President Trump caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans because of his handling of Covid 19, they are in sane. No world leader could stop the spread of this respiratory virus. However, Joe Biden and democrats have caused the deaths of hundreds of white people, while whipping up weak minded people to kill many whites. Biden and the democrats are criminals. Any one who is white, man or woman, that supports the democratic party is enabling a criminal organization to perpetrate violence on white people, including murder.

chet roman , says: November 13, 2020 at 7:05 am GMT • 12.8 hours ago

Since the article was from a German magazine it's understandable that there is no mention of "the one who shall not be named". No mention of the people behind the Lawfare group, the same people behind the impeachment, the same people providing financial and ideological support for the BLM/Antifa, the same people that own the media that spewed lies for 5 years and censored any mention of the Biden family corruption, no mention of the people behind this Color Revolution, the same people who promoted the mail in voting and those that managed the narrative for the media on election night to stop Trump's momentum.

For the public consumption the election will be described in vague terms, like this article, blaming special interests and institutions like the FBI, CIA and MIC without naming names as if an institution, not the oligarchs and chosen pulling the strings, are somehow Marxist, anti-white or anti-Christian.

Clay Alexander , says: November 13, 2020 at 7:18 am GMT • 12.6 hours ago

The interviewer quotes the Heritage Foundation does anyone even care what they say? The English Tavistock Institute by way of the CIA which the British molded from the OSS created programs for the Heritage Foundation as well as the Hoover Institute, MIT, Stanford University, Wharton, Rand etc. These "rightwing think tanks" were created to counter the CIA's "leftwing think tanks" at Columbia, Berkeley etc. Thank you British Intelligence.

Priss Factor , says: Website November 13, 2020 at 7:24 am GMT • 12.5 hours ago

Bloat the Vote: https://www.thedailybell.com/all-articles/news-analysis/2020-wisconsin-election-fraud/

Thomasina , says: November 13, 2020 at 7:31 am GMT • 12.3 hours ago

Steve Bannon was just interviewing someone (can't remember his name). Apparently there are about 200 to 300 IT professionals/engineers working on these so-called "glitches" (not glitches at all) which mysteriously "disappeared" thousands of Trump votes. Then they'd dump phony Biden votes into the mix. These IT professionals are going to follow the trail.

I've also heard that Dominion Voting Systems played a big part in this scam by using algorithms. One Trump lawyer said that big revelations are coming.

We're going to have to be patient and just wait.

"The inclination of Republicans is for Trump to protect America's reputation by conceding the election."

I honestly think it's more like the old established Republicans (corporate bought) want Trump to lose because that is what their campaign donors want (Big Pharma, Wall Street, etc.) They are part of the elite, and the elite (both the Democrats AND Republicans) want Trump gone so they can continue their crony capitalist looting. They've got to appear like they're behind Trump, but I don't think they are. Of course, that's not all Republican representatives.

Sounds like they've been rigging elections for awhile now. I bet they just messed up with Hillary. I think that's why she was so upset. She had it, but they screwed up and didn't supply enough ballots.

Biff , says: November 13, 2020 at 7:39 am GMT • 12.2 hours ago

My conclusion is: They are probably going to get away with it.

My advice: Make them suffer.

sally , says: November 13, 2020 at 7:45 am GMT • 12.1 hours ago
@KenH inventive creative new ways to deceive.. first it was election machines, then mail in votes. next it will be magic carpet voting. But the votes don't count, cause it is the electoral college that elects the President.

Trump also lost a significant number who did not understand Trump was an Israeli at heart, they thought he was a uncoothed NYC red blooded American.

As far as white, black or pokadot color or any of the religions ganging up against Trump I don't think that happened, the fall out into statistically discoverable categories is just that, fall out, not those categories conspiring to vote or not vote one way or the other.

Wizard of Oz , says: November 13, 2020 at 7:46 am GMT • 12.1 hours ago

PCR seems to have trouble seeing a difference between the counting of perfectly proper votes which Pres Trump's post office delivered late which may or may not be allowed by law which can be determined in court, and fraud like the dead voting or votes being forged.

Anonymous [272] Disclaimer , says: November 13, 2020 at 7:54 am GMT • 12.0 hours ago

The fraud is all so transparent but no one in the power elite seems to give a crap whether the public catches on or not these days. They know that the entire media which creates the false matrix of contrived "truth" that we all live in will back them to the hilt because they are actually just one more working part in the grand conspiracy. We all know that when "O'Brian" says 2 + 2 equals 5 we must all believe it, or at least say we do. We interface with "O'Brian's" minions on a daily basis but we don't know the ultimate identity of "O'Brian" (in the singular or multiple). Many guesses are made, but they hide that from us fairly well with the aid of their militaries and "intelligence" agencies (aka secret police in other times and places).

Wally , says: November 13, 2020 at 8:08 am GMT • 11.7 hours ago
@MarkinLA s://amgreatness.com/2020/11/09/on-electoral-fraud-in-2020/"> https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/09/on-electoral-fraud-in-2020/
Why Did Six Battleground States with Democrat Governors (Except One) ALL Pause Counting on Election Night? And How Was This Coordinated?
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/11/six-battleground-states-democrat-governors-pause-counting-election-night-coordinated/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_campaign=websitesharingbuttons
Biff , says: November 13, 2020 at 8:57 am GMT • 10.9 hours ago

For example in the early hours of the morning of November 4 large ballot drops occurred in Michigan and Wisconsin that wiped out Trump's lead.

In a very similar vein, it is the same thing that happened to Bernie Sanders during the primary's. Joe was down and out, and Bernie was enjoying the lead and then "Bam!" Overnight Joe is back on top.

Well, fool me once,,,,,, .,and blah, blah whatever Bush said .

Verymuchalive , says: November 13, 2020 at 9:48 am GMT • 10.1 hours ago
@Stephen Allen

Dr Roberts has referenced in the interview a UR article that goes into considerable detail about the massive electoral fraud by the Democrats and their partners. You've obviously not bothered to read it.

You're like one of those MSM hacks who denies electoral fraud without making any attempt to look at the evidence.

Sollipsist , says: November 13, 2020 at 10:17 am GMT • 9.6 hours ago
@Begemot And it's almost always a closer race than anyone would have guessed beforehand -- which I also find suspicious. How likely is it that the majority of presidential elections over the last century were decided by more or less even numbers of voters from each party, between more or less evenly matched candidates?

Really seems like they've perfected the art of putting on rigged political shows that you can't quite believe in, but don't have anything really solid to back up your suspicions. It's like the "no evidence of fraud" canard -- anything solid enough to show obvious manipulation is explained away as the exception, rather than the tip of a very deep iceberg

James Speaks , says: November 13, 2020 at 10:40 am GMT • 9.2 hours ago
@S Martini

Like the false accusations about Russia, delegitimizing the presidential election as fraud is turning out to be much ado about nothing.

Let's review. The Democrats perpetrated the phony 2016 Russian influence fraud, and now the Democrats are perpetrating the phony 2020 election victory.

The common elements are Democrats perpetrate fraud.

Do try to keep up.

Lee , says: November 13, 2020 at 11:48 am GMT • 8.1 hours ago

IMO this is a simple remedy to settle the election fraud mess or we will be arguing about this 20 years from now .from the American Thinker.

The candidates on the ballot must have an opportunity to have observers whom they choose to oversee the entire process so the candidates are satisfied that they won or lost a free and fair election.

That is not what happened in the 2020 election. That is the single most important and simple fact that needs to be understood and communicated. The 2020 election was not a free and fair election, because poll-watchers were not allowed to do their essential job. The 2020 election can still be a free and fair election with a clear winner, whoever that may be, but time is running out.

In every instance where poll-watchers were not allowed to observe the process, those votes must be recounted. They must be recounted with poll-watchers from both sides present. If there are votes that cannot be recounted because the envelops were discarded, those votes must be discarded. Put the blame for this on the officials who decided to count the votes in secret. Consider it a way to discourage secret vote counts in the future.

The pandemic has not been fearful enough to close liquor stores, and it in should not be used as excuse to remove the poll-watchers who are essential to a free and fair election. If we must have social distancing, then use cameras.

Certainly, there are other issues with the 2020 election. There may be problems with software, and there are issues like signature verification and dead people voting. Everything should be considered and examined, but no other issue should distract from the simple fact that both sides must be able to view the entire process. If one side is not allowed to view the vote-counting, then that side should be calling it a fraud. We should all be calling it a fraud.

Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/11/the_simplest_most_important_issue_regarding_the_2020_election.html#ixzz6dfsChU00

TomGregg , says: November 13, 2020 at 12:23 pm GMT • 7.5 hours ago
@Anon

https://www.youtube.com/embed/OyBNmecVtdU?feature=oembed

The Spirit of Enoch Powell , says: November 13, 2020 at 1:02 pm GMT • 6.8 hours ago

...Trump had control of the Senate, the House and of course the Executive between his inauguration in January of 2017 and the Midterm Elections of 2018, a total time period of 1 year and 10 months. What did he do during this time? He deregulated financial services and passed corporate tax cuts.

At the end of the day, being emotionally invested in US elections is no different to being emotionally invested in Keeping up with the Kardashians , that is to say your life wouldn't be that different if your don't follow either.

Realist , says: November 13, 2020 at 1:04 pm GMT • 6.8 hours ago

The Democrats Have Stolen the Presidential Election

The Deep State Has Stolen the Presidential Election. FIFY. But they have been in control for decades they just don't care who knows now. They are taking final steps to make their control impervious to attack.

anon [434] Disclaimer , says: November 13, 2020 at 1:06 pm GMT • 6.8 hours ago
@Notsofast nd protect the actual elephant in the Oval Office: CIA.

Trumman did speak up one month after JFK was killed by the unmentionable "I" of M.(I).I.C.

https://archive.org/stream/LimitCIARoleToIntelligenceByHarrySTruman/Limit%20CIA%20Role%20To%20Intelligence%20by%20Harry%20S%20Truman_djvu.txt

This is the reason that the establishment latched on to the Eisenhowerian bon mot but entirely memory hole Trumman's far more explicit warning a freaking month after a sitting president is shot like a turkey in Dallas: it white washes CIA and NSC .

Priss Factor , says: Website November 13, 2020 at 1:31 pm GMT • 6.3 hours ago

Why are CIA goons like Anderson Pooper serving as journalists? CIA is a criminal organization that subverts other nations.

MLK , says: November 13, 2020 at 1:32 pm GMT • 6.3 hours ago

The place to begin, and it's mind-blowing when you think about it this way, is that nothing was resolved on election night. Not who will take the oath on January 20th. Nor which party will control the Senate. Nor even who will be Speaker and which party will control the House.

Suffice it to say, a still raging factional struggle has simply moved to a greater degree behind the curtain.

I noted this movie reference on another thread here:

If your father dies, you'll make the deal, Sonny.

-- "The Godfather"

My point being, you're foolish if you ascribe certainty as to outcome at this point.

Being rid of Trump has been as close to a dues ex machina for the establishment as imaginable since he took the oath. This ineluctable observation elicits no end of foot-stomping by those who assume it necessarily says anything positive about the man.

With every persistent revision of the script they wrote for him, all ending with his political demise at least, Trump has not just survived but grown stronger. While the Democrats turned our elections into something only seen in a third-world shit hole, Trump legitimately drew 71M votes from Americans.

That's a lot of air in the balloon. Believe me, filth like Russian mole Brennan may think everything is finished once they get rid of terrible, awful Trump, but those above his pay grade know better.

Like him or hate him, Trump is the only principal not wholly or largely discredited. He was saved from destruction during his first term by the Republican base moving to protect him. That was the import of his 90-95% approval among them, destroy him and you destroy the Republican Party.

Now, despite -- or perhaps, because of -- everything they've done, that base now includes a significant number of Democrats and independents. Trump is merely a vessel for an American majority attached to this constitutional republic thingie we've got going.

Don't get lost in the details. This isn't a puzzle you can solve by internet sleuthing. The plan they executed -- to steal sufficiently to make the outcome inevitable by the morning after the election at the latest -- failed. This was evident early on Election Day (e.g. fake water main breaks in Atlanta) and necessitated their playing their Fox/AZ card and shutting down the count at least until they had removed Republican monitors.

BannedHipster , says: Website November 13, 2020 at 2:57 pm GMT • 4.9 hours ago

People need to stop falling for Republican bullshit.

The Republicans control:

1. The Senate

2. The Supreme Court with a 6 to 3 majority.

3. The majority of state governments by a huge margin:

https://bannedhipster.home.blog/2020/11/12/bidens-first-cabinet-pick-israel-first-zionist-jew-ron-klain/

"In 22 states, Republicans will hold unified control over the governor's office and both houses of the legislature, giving the party wide political latitude -- including in states like Florida and Georgia."

"Eleven states will have divided governments in 2021, unchanged from this year: Democratic governors will need to work with Republican legislators in eight states, and Republican governors will contend with Democratic lawmakers in three."

The Democrats have: Joe Biden, and a slim majority in the House of Representatives which they are almost certain to lose in two years.

What the Republicans are going to do is everything we hate, but they will pretend they were "forced" to do it by the Democrats – the Democrats being the minority party.

Amnesty? Democrats made us do it.

More immigration? Democrats made us do it.

The Republican party is the greater of two evils.

Rurik , says: November 13, 2020 at 2:59 pm GMT • 4.9 hours ago

Who else could have survived what Trump has been subjected to by the Establishment and their media prostitutes. In the United States the media is known as "presstitutes" -- press prostitutes. That is what Udo Ulfkotte says they are in Europe.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/-sYUmnLnoz8?feature=oembed

Mr. Ulfkotte died of a "heart attack" in January, 2017

Rest in Peace Udo.

Zarathustra , says: November 13, 2020 at 3:00 pm GMT • 4.9 hours ago

Left and right.
(What you small brains do not understand is this.)
Democrats enabling the elite to invest in far east (lower wage costs, higher profits) did abandon the working class in America. Democrats by this act did throw away the working class as a dirty rug.
Democrats with their TPP exporting most of the production to far east would totally destroy working class in USA. Trump's first act was to cancel this insanity. Democrats are insanely delusional.
Democrats were left. Left is a party that supports the working people.
So here switch occurred. Democratic party now represent the elite, and Republicans now represent the working people.
(The irony of the fate)

Robert Dolan , says: November 13, 2020 at 3:26 pm GMT • 4.4 hours ago

https://www.bitchute.com/video/hxrVAGuE7Oo1/

Robert Snefjella , says: November 13, 2020 at 3:30 pm GMT • 4.4 hours ago

The headline for PCR's article is a prediction, not yet established, and incomplete.

There is an ongoing massive attempt to steal the Presidential election as well as to steal an unknown number of House and Senate seats, and who knows what else.

The 'game' is still on. Many tens of millions of citizens – actual total unknown but possibly in numbers unprecedented in American history – voted for Trump. Republican candidates for office generally had strong support, but again, the actual percentage of support is unknown but presumably larger than now 'recorded'.

There are also the many millions who ardently supported Trump, know that Biden is illegitimate, deeply corrupt, and the precursor to perils unknown. Their determination and backbone and intelligence will now be tested.

There is the electoral college process; there are the state legislators that have a say in the process; there is the Supreme Court.

There is also the possibility of pertinent executive orders that mandate transparent processes in the face of, say, apprehended insurrection via fraudulent voting processes.

There is also the matter of how millions of 'deplorables' with trucks and tractors and firearms and other means to make their point will react to obvious massive election travesty.

The conjunction of the COVID global scamdemic/plandemic, with crazed Bill Gates and kin lurking in the background with needles, 'peaceful' protesters in many cities setting fires and looting with near impunity, and a mass media that is clearly comprehensively committed to a demonic degree of dishonesty and manipulation, and lunatic levels of 'identity politics' ideology, are among the elements setting the stage for what may be an historical watershed.

The American Revolution in the 18th century, against the British Crown's authority, came about after years of simmering anger and sporadic resistance against British injustice. At some point there was a 'tipping point'. When Germany invaded and occupied Norway early in the 2nd WW, an effective resistance quickly formed in reaction, where death and torture were the known willing risk. Two years before, those forming the resistance would have been just going on with their lives.

No one knows today how this plays out.

Agent76 , says: November 13, 2020 at 3:45 pm GMT • 4.1 hours ago

Who's Afraid of an Open Debate? The Truth About the Commission on Presidential Debates. The CPD is a duopoly which allows the major party candidates to draft secret agreements about debate arrangements including moderators, debate format and even participants.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/1NXhoP5bQ2M?feature=oembed

Mar 6, 2014 Truth in Media "End Partisanship"

Ben Swann explains how the new coalition of EndPartisanship org is working to break the 2 party hold on primary elections, which currently lock around 50% of voters out of the process.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/h1zRfXkOmPI?feature=oembed

Sep 5, 2012 DNC Platform Changes on God, Jerusalem Spur Contentious Floor Vote

Democratic National Convention 2012: Delegates opposed to adding language on God, Israel's capital to platform shout, 'No!' in floor vote.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/t8BwqzzqcDs?feature=oembed

anon [287] Disclaimer , says: November 13, 2020 at 4:21 pm GMT • 3.5 hours ago

For those who are sick of Fake News CNN or FoxNews, watch this new channel that many Trump voters are flocking to:

https://www.newsmaxtv.com/

I am currently watching an interview with SD Governor Kristi Noem, who went on ABC to challenge George Stenopolosus' claim that there is no fraud in this election. She pointed out that there has been many allegations, including dead people voting in PA and GA, she says we don't know how widespread this is, but we owe it to the 70+ million people who voted for Trump to investigate and ensure a clean and fair election. She said we gave Al Gore 37 days to investigate the result in 2000, why aren't we giving the same to Trump?

She is extremely articulate and sounds intelligent and honest, and what's more courageous to come forward like this. I hope she runs for president in 2024, I'd vote for her.

Anonymous [721] Disclaimer , says: November 13, 2020 at 4:21 pm GMT • 3.5 hours ago
@Chris in Cackalacky

Am I the only one who sees something profoundly spiritual happening in front of our eyes?

Yes. In reality, 5% of White men sent Trump packing. That doesn't match the GOP negrophile narrative where "based" Hindustanis join the emerging conservative coalition to make sure White people can't get affordable healthcare in their own countries, though. So we'll have to watch you parasites spool up this pedantic "fraud" nonsense until the fat orange zioclown gracelessly gets dragged out.

OutsideMan , says: November 13, 2020 at 4:30 pm GMT • 3.4 hours ago
@Drew

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups and Average Citizens
by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf

Agent76 , says: November 13, 2020 at 4:31 pm GMT • 3.3 hours ago
@TomGregg

Good post. You will gain more insight from this background on the speech and drafting.

Jan 19, 2011 Eisenhower's "Military-Industrial Complex" Speech Origins and Significance US National Archives

President Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address, known for its warnings about the growing power of the "military-industrial complex," was nearly two years in the making. This Inside the Vaults video short follows newly discovered papers revealing that Eisenhower was deeply involved in crafting the speech.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Gg-jvHynP9Y?feature=oembed

Thomasina , says: November 13, 2020 at 4:42 pm GMT • 3.2 hours ago
@The Real World

Great article. Thanks. Agree with you about the big stealing being electronic. Trump tweeted out yesterday that over 2 million votes were stolen this way. For him to say this, they must have evidence.

Dinesh D'Souza said he hopes that when this matter comes before the Supreme Court that they will tackle once and for all what constitutes a legal vote.

Some pretty big names are involved with this Dominion Voting. It will be interesting to see what Trump's team of IT experts discover re the use of algorithms to swing the vote.

Cyrano , says: November 13, 2020 at 5:03 pm GMT • 2.8 hours ago

Why (Oh, why) did Trump had to go? Because Trump is an enema to the Deep State. He was threatening to expose the biggest lie of the last 100 years – the supposed "liberalism" of US...

Genrick Yagoda , says: November 13, 2020 at 5:07 pm GMT • 2.7 hours ago
@Wizard of Oz

It has already been determined by the court. Pennsylvania ruled that late ballots are not to be counted.

https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2020/11/602-MD-2020-Order-Nov.-12.pdf

DanFromCT , says: November 13, 2020 at 5:15 pm GMT • 2.6 hours ago
@Stephen Allen

The author refers to a body of overwhelmingly persuasive evidence of voter fraud that can be specified and quantified to provide proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in criminal cases, not to mention hands down proof in civil cases requiring only a preponderance of the evidence to establish guilt. Furthermore, the Democrats' easily documented, elaborate efforts at concealing the vote counting process by shutting down the counting prior to sneaking truckloads of ballots in the back door is by itself powerful circumstantial evidence of their guilt. You have no idea what "evidence" means, either in general usage or in its strictly legal sense.

fatmanscoop , says: November 13, 2020 at 5:15 pm GMT • 2.6 hours ago

The election cannot be trusted at all, just based on the insane entitled emotional state of the Globalist establishment alone. The system as-a-whole cannot be trusted, for the same reason. They are actively corrupting it in every way they can, and fully believe (as a matter of religious conviction) that they are right to do so.

fatmanscoop , says: November 13, 2020 at 5:38 pm GMT • 2.2 hours ago
@Curmudgeon

"no evidence of wide spread voter fraud"

That's one of the Jew/Anglo Puritan Establishment's new catch-phrases. There's also "no evidence" that Joe Biden acted in a corrupt manner in Ukraine, even though he admitted to it on tape. There's "no evidence" that Big Tech is biased against conservative plebians, despite their removing conservative plebians' published content arbitrarily and with no State compulsion to do so. The phrase "there's no evidence" is just a public commitment to ignore any evidence, no matter how blatant or obvious.

Robert Dolan , says: November 13, 2020 at 5:39 pm GMT • 2.2 hours ago

https://www.trunews.com/stream/michigan-republican-governor-candidate-saw-voter-machines-connected-to-internet

Peripatetic Itch , says: November 13, 2020 at 5:41 pm GMT • 2.2 hours ago
@DanFromCT

This newly discovered legal standard goes beyond "preponderance of the evidence" or even "guilt beyond a reasonable doubt" to establish absolute certainty as the standard.

Just the obvious and necessary complement of the Bob Mueller standard for Russian collusion, don't you think -- "could not (quite) exonerate"? /s

Don't you dare call this hypocrisy.

Orville H. Larson , says: November 13, 2020 at 5:57 pm GMT • 1.9 hours ago
@Rogue

When it comes to protecting the integrity of elections, "low-tech" might be best!

anon [771] Disclaimer , says: November 13, 2020 at 6:05 pm GMT • 1.8 hours ago
@endthefed

His impotence makes a lot more sense when you know the full version was supposed to be Military-Industrial Congressional Complex.

The Real World , says: November 13, 2020 at 6:42 pm GMT • 1.2 hours ago
@TheTrumanShow as the reason why.

They went for a softer approach in KY in 2019. The first-term Repub Gov had a Yankee's forthrightness so they just latched onto comments he made regarding the underfunded teachers pension program and amped-it to high heaven getting teachers all in a frightful frenzy.

In that solidly Red state, with all other prominent offices on the ballot (AG, SoS, etc.) going overwhelmingly Repub , somehow the Repub Gov loses to the Dem by around 5000 votes. The "teachers pension" narrative was rolled-out as the reason. (Btw, it seems that Dominion, or another type, software was used to switch the votes in that race. I've seen video about it.)

Art , says: November 13, 2020 at 6:47 pm GMT • 1.1 hours ago
@Orville H. Larson

When it comes to protecting the integrity of elections, "low-tech" might be best!

Paper ballots as ascribed by Tulsi Gabbard legislation is the only safe option for elections. Kudos to Tulsi!

The Real World , says: November 13, 2020 at 6:55 pm GMT • 56 minutes ago
@Orville H. Larson out how the winds are blowing. There is nothing good about it.

Why not this:
-- ONLY in-person voting over a 2-day period, a Sat and Sun, with polls being open from 6AM to 9PM both days.
-- Exceptions are the traditional requested absentee ballot where the voter can be authenticated.
-- Paper ballots must be used at the polls and no single box of 'Straight Vote by Party' is offered.
-- Some kind of SIMPLE scanning tabulator could be used of the ballots and with it NOT being connected to the internet.

There is far too much cheating opportunity built into our current system. That's intended, of course.
It needs to end!

Priss Factor , says: Website November 13, 2020 at 7:02 pm GMT • 49 minutes ago

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/11/exclusive-based-reports-auditors-specialists-data-analysts-statisticians-number-illegitimate-votes-identified-four-swing-states-enough-overturn-election/

... ... ...

No Friend Of The Devil , says: November 13, 2020 at 7:09 pm GMT • 42 minutes ago

Because you don't get it. You are missing the big picture. It was well known that these systems had the ability to be hacked as soon as they were implemented. It is also a well known fact that massive mail in ballots increases the likelihood that corrupt individuals are more likely to get away with election fraud.

Everyone knew about the potential for voter fraud to occur, but the entire system is corrupt, including Trump who has allowed the massive corruption within the system that was present when he entered office to persist and grow because he is a wimpy, spineless, coward, that was too afraid to make any waves and take the heat that he promised his voters.

Why anyone voted for Trump in 2020 confounds me. I voted for him in 2016 and he has turned out to be one of the worst presidents in history.

Trump in his cowardess and dishonesty knew that the ailing economy would harm his chances of being re-elected, so he allowed the health scare scamdemic to occur and destroy the livelihoods, lives, and businesses of hundreds of millions of Americans because he is a psychopath. Trump did not do what he promised. Trump made America worse than it has ever been since the end of slavery. Jeremy Powell said today that the economy is dead and will never recover.

The only injustices that Trump gave a damn about were the injustices against himself and his family, and has committed countless injustices against the entire country and world during his term. Trump is a corrupt narcissist. The facts prove it. Trump is such a corrupt narcissist that he was willing to destroy the entire economy based on scientific fraud, high crimes, and treason to use as political cover for his own incompetency which is the most offensive and disgusting diabolical act ever perpetrated on the entire country.

Trump has also demanded the extradition of Assange after telling his voters that he loved wikileaks. Trump is a two-faced, lying, fraud. It has been his pattern. He consistently supports various groups and people like Wikileaks, Proud Boys, and others and panders to them and voters and tells people that he loves them, and then every time without fail when the heat is on, Trump says," I really don't know anything about them."

"I know nothing." Trump saying "I know nothing." defines his presidency and who he is as a person, a spineless, pandering, corrupt, two-faced, narcissist, loser, and wimp!

Why would anyone vote for him the second time around after a record of pathological incompetency and pathological corruption? What's to approve of about him? Go ahead, investigate voter fraud it if is permitted, and if it isn't then ask yourselves why it is that a system that enables election fraud is in place, and ask yourselves who had the ability to change it and, who had the ability to benefit from it!

Andrea Iravani

[Jan 04, 2021] Tell me a better term than "globalist" for nationals who are titans of industry who betray their fellow nationals in the labor force by looking outside their own nation?

Jan 04, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Bluedotterel , Jan 4 2021 6:04 utc | 78

Posted by: Lemming | Jan 4 2021 5:47 utc | 77

The current term "globalization" was originated by Ted Levitt in an article in the Harvard Business Review in the 80s and taken up by the Reaganites to push for offshoring of factories to countries with fewer workers rights and environmental concerns. He edited the magazine and was a professor at Harvard Business School. Those "weirdos" who championed the term were the corporate and financial behemoths that preferred it as a euphemism for "economic imperialism"


Lemming , Jan 4 2021 5:47 utc | 77

Posted by: NemesisCalling | Jan 4 2021 1:07 utc | 56

Our nation, right now, is on the cusp of a great earthquake which will change its arrangement so that the interior will not be beholden to the coastal elites much longer, who have themselves thrown off the mantle of nationhood in favor of the globalist paradigm which values nihilistic individualism over all.

So, in short, you're describing capitalism. A capitalist economy favors individualism, profits over morality, and is mostly centered around the idea of private property as described by John Locke. This worked wonders in the vast uncharted territories of America in the 18th and 19th century, when the population of the United States was below 20 million and they needed to compete, FAST, against agressive european civilizations who looked at them with envy.

Now that they are 332 millions and counting, that their natural resources are slowly depleting and that other civilizations have adapted to the previously unknown phenomenon of the American empire, USans are faced with a crisis in all sectors, including faith. How come a system that worked so well for you these past 300 years suddenly fails? well, not suddenly, but realizing that took a while.

Oh, I know!! It must be because of all those treacherous businessmen who traded their souls and their country for a quick buck! but we need to condemn them without condemning the whole system, and saying "capitalism sucks" makes us sound like Ivan the Red Commie. What a pickle. Let's call them "globalists"! so we can rally the nationalists as a bonus and say it's all because of evil foreigners.

On certain sites, it goes as far as calling "globalists" ... communists. Or Chinese. Or Russian. Sure, why not, everyone needs their Emmanuel Goldstein.

"Globalism" is a funny name some weirdos invented since the first Wall Street crashes happened to justify the worst excesses of the current capitalist economic system without pointing the finger at the real culprits. I say it's funny because it looks like nationalist clickbait for the 2 minutes of hate everyone in the West is prescribed each day in this hyper-social Internet.

Sad fact is, "globalists" are run-of-the-mill bosses who decided it was better for their end-of-year bonuses if they outsourced some or all of their production to cheap chinese companies, and not have to pay US salaries anymore. That's not globalist, that's called looking to make a profit in the short term.

Formerly T-Bear , Jan 4 2021 7:47 utc | 96

@ NemesisCalling | Jan 4 2021 6:34 utc | 82

Tell me a better term than "globalist" for nationals who are titans of industry who betray their fellow nationals in the labor force by looking outside their own nation?

A term of rather recent vintage is Labour arbitrage that is substituting less costly labour for higher costing labour. The driving motive for all offshoring or externalising labour resources from the home marketplace. Walmart made billions doing this as does Amazon.

Fnord13 , Jan 4 2021 8:44 utc | 100

@82 and @98 Nemesis Calling and Lemming

I agree with Lemming's position on this. And I think Nemesis Calling is wrong about what the term "Globalist" implies. If a "nationalist" is someone who's loyal to a nation, then isn't a "globalist" someone who is loyal to the whole globe? Humanity today has many massive problems that are extremely difficult and perhaps impossible to deal with on a purely national basis. Nuclear weapons, global climate change, pandemic diseases, the potential threats and benefits of real artificial intelligence, the extinction of so many species, controlling multinational corporations, the threat of mass starvation, global inequality... these are all problems which seem to many people to need the whole human species, or the whole globe, working together to address them.

I think the major reason why many capitalists started calling themselves "globalists" back in the 1980's was because they saw this was an idea which was becoming increasingly popular, and they wanted to try and coopt it for their own benefit.

The trouble was that the CEO's who decided it would be personally profitable for them to ship their companies jobs to low wage countries were not "real" globalists. If they had really understood what the decisions they were making would do to their countries, or even to the corporations they were responsible to their shareholders for managing, they might be accused of being frauds or even traitors. But they probably didn't understand, so it's probably more accurate to just call them parts of a greedy and shortsighted elite, which was far too arrogant to realize how countries like China would be able to exploit their shortsighted folly. They thought they were being so clever about their plans to exploit the Chinese. But the irony is that a major reason why they underestimated the Chinese is that they didn't understand that the fact that the Chinese were Marxists meant that the Chinese had a different and in some ways better understanding of how Capitalism worked than they did. They never dreamed that the Chinese would be able to make Lenin's prediction that capitalists would sell them the rope they needed to hang capitalism come true.

[Jan 02, 2021] No To War Profiteers

Jan 02, 2021 | www.veteransforpeace.org

Demonstrators push back against Buncombe County incentives for Pratt & Whitney

Veterans For Peace members in Asheville, North Carolina participated in a Reject Raytheon Demonstration on Dec. 9th.

"Prior to the county vote on the incentives, a spokesperson for the company said it made $21 billion in sales last year. More than half came from the manufacturing of commercial engines used for passengers and cargo. He said military engines made up about 20-30 percent of sales.

"So much of our military hardware gets made here and is sent overseas and used in proxy wars and in purposes that don't really serve the security of the United States itself," Veterans for Peace's Gerry Werhan said."

Read the article

[Jan 01, 2021] White emigres from Bolshvism and their potential impact on Nazism by Spencer J. Quinn

Dec 30, 2020 | www.unz.com
3,000 WORDS 68 COMMENTS REPLY RSS

Michael Kellogg
The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945
Cambridge University Press, 2005

With the near-universal demonization of the Third Reich, historians have developed a blind spot for the genesis of German anti-Semitism. Michael Kellogg, in his 2005 work The Russian Roots of Nazism, sheds a sharp light on this topic and points our attention eastward. He reveals how the post-World War I atrocities of the Soviet Union along with the presence of a large, vengeful, and politically active White émigré population in Weimar Germany played a critical role in developing National Socialist attitudes on Jews and Bolshevism. And in making this argument, he not only addresses the errors of other historians, but he also makes an indirect case for much of Nazism itself.

Kellogg's work is crucial for several reasons, most prominent being the facts themselves. The interwar period in Germany, the Baltic states, and Ukraine were roiled in conflict, intrigue, revolution, and, most of all, uncertainty. It was an interesting time. More importantly, it was consequential. Any history that discloses previously unknown or overlooked events from that time and place will have value.

Kellogg also exhibits remarkable academic discipline by not taking sides in the political drama he unfolds. There is nothing tendentious about The Russian Roots of Nazism aside from its pointed historiography. This is good since it lets the facts speak for themselves. On the other hand, Kellogg's avoidance of a broader political schema makes the book a bit of a slog. It's not biased, but it's not sexy, either. But Kellogg's prose is tight and serviceable, and he offers concise summaries at the end of each chapter and at the end of the book for those who wish to skim.

The Russian Roots of Nazism can also be viewed as a strike against the anti-German racism of Jewish writers such as Daniel Goldhagen. In his 1996 work, Hitler's Willing Executioners , Goldhagen accuses the Germans of being inherently racist, anti-Semitic, and "eliminationist." This takes the extreme form of what's known as the Sonderweg (special path) thesis, which posits the inevitability of the Third Reich, given the weakness of the German bourgeoisie. Kellogg demolishes this idea by uncovering the foreign influences of National Socialism during its formative years and also by portraying Adolf Hitler in his mid-thirties and other early-period Nazis as three-dimensional human beings rather than comic book villains.

Most importantly, Kellogg demonstrates how the Nazis may have had excellent reasons for their anti-Semitism and their anti-Bolshevism, thereby justifying much of what they did during the interwar period. This may not have been Kellogg's intention. Regardless, by eschewing a political agenda and by relying so heavily upon National Socialist primary sources (rather than the mountain of secondary sources that condemn the Nazis), Kellogg leaves the door open for a revisionist, and much more positive, interpretation of National Socialism.

Our story may as well begin in German-occupied Ukraine in 1918. After Soviet Russia's capitulation in the war, many disaffected Russian and Ukrainian officers began cooperating with their German counterparts, bonding over their shared sense of nationalism and their mutual hatred for the Bolsheviks. When the Germans abandoned Ukraine the following year, they took thousands of these so-called "White" officers with them, including some, such as Vladimir Biskupsky, Ivan Poltavets-Ostranitsa, Pavel Bermondt-Avalov, Fedor Vinberg, and Piotr Shabelsky-Bork, who would work closely with the Nazis in years to come. Shabelsky-Bork deserves special mention because he was the first to transfer the forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the West, thereby unleashing one of the most famous conspiracy theories upon the world.

As the Ukrainian Biskupsky became a leader among the 600,000 White émigrés in Weimar Germany, he also became one of two de facto leaders of a secret, conspiratorial organization known as Aufbau (or, Reconstruction) which promoted a particularly urgent strain of apocalyptic anti-Semitism. Max von Scheubner-Richter, a Baltic German émigré from Latvia, was the other, and soon this organization had had great influence upon the nascent Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler himself. In fact, Scheubner-Richter grew quite close to Hitler and marched arm-in-arm with him during the failed 1923 Putsch in Munich where he was shot and killed. Thereafter, Hitler considered him a martyr for National Socialism.

Two other White émigrés, Alfred Rosenberg, another Baltic German, and the Russian Fedor Vinberg, became leading theorists of National Socialism, with Rosenberg ultimately gaining the most stature in the Nazi Party. Publisher and early Hitler mentor Dietrich Eckart introduced Rosenberg to Hitler, and the men quickly grew to admire each other. When Hitler was imprisoned after the Munich Putsch, he appointed Rosenberg as his successor. By World War II, this émigré was so embedded in high-level Nazi operations that the Allies rewarded him at Nuremburg with a sentence of hanging.

Bavaria in the early 1920s was a unique petri dish of nationalist and anti-Semitic ideas and action. Stirred into the mix were the völkisch Germans. These were Aryan identitarians, Teutonic traditionalists, and Thule Society people who drew racialist ideas from the likes of Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Many of these people were still smarting over the revolution of 1918, which forced the Kaiser to abdicate, and shared a distrust of Jews for their materialistic and "world-affirming" (that is, non-heroic, non-transcendent) behavior.

Add to this the White émigrés who brought with them not only The Protocols but the hyper-nationalist ideas of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Solovev. A militaristic form of Christianity played into this as well, with the great Jew-Gentile struggle often being portrayed in Biblical terms. These were people who had witnessed firsthand Red atrocities during the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War and had experience in the Tsar's army or in the reactionary organization, the Black Hundreds. It's no wonder they blamed the Jews for upending their world. Their world had been upended, and they couldn't help but notice how a disproportionate number of Bolsheviks were Jews, especially at the top.

The result was an explosive burst of national and anti-Jewish sentiment which culminated in 1933 when Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany. Kellogg repeatedly stresses that without the Whites who were more anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik than the Germans after World War I, the National Socialists would likely not have been as successful as they were. No so-called "far-Right" organization in Germany before the Nazis had garnered popular support. This does away with the notion that the Germans were somehow inherently anti-Semitic. Where Goldhagen insists that "German antisemitism was sui generis, " Kellogg demonstrates that it was the powerful gestalt of the German völkisch movement and the White fear and fascination with Jewish Bolshevism which was sui generis .

Hitler harbored standard socialist views well into 1919. Hitler's former immediate commander on the Western Front in World War I, Aide-de-Camp Hans Mend, asserted that his earlier underling had exclaimed towards the end of 1918 in Munich, "Thank God that the kings' crowns have fallen from the tree. Now we proletarians have something to say". . .

Hitler only began to develop a detailed anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic ideology beginning in the second half of 1919 through his collaboration with Eckart and Rosenberg, who served as his early mentors. Mend confirmed Hitler's rapid political lurch from the far left to the far right in postwar Munich. When he heard Hitler speak publicly at the beginning of 1920, he thought, "Adi has changed his colors, the red lad!" In addition to borrowing anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic ideas from Eckart and Rosenberg, Hitler soon learned far-right concepts that castigated "Jewish Bolshevism" from the Aufbau ideologues Scheubner-Richter and Vinberg as well.

The White émigrés from 1918 to 1923 lent a sense of Manichean urgency to the postwar German zeitgeist. It was, in effect, good versus evil, Christ versus Anti-Christ, and the slew of conspiracy theories emanating from the Aufbau circle painted this struggle in the starkest black and white. For example, one theory posited that Leon Trotsky was a Satanist who practiced Black Mass rituals in the Kremlin and prayed to the Devil for the defeat of the Whites. But this alliance was also practical. If the v ölkisch Germans and the émigré Whites didn't have the exact same enemies, their shared ethnocentrism gave them similar goals. Whereas the Whites aimed to conquer the Soviet Union and remove the Jewish yoke from the Slavic peoples, the Germans needed to defy the Entente and overthrow the socialist, pro-Soviet Weimar government. There was quite of bit of overlap here, and Hitler's Nazi Party approved of the White plan to invade the Soviet Union and liberate independent republics such as Russia and Ukraine. Hitler indeed had a great interest in Nazifying Ukraine, which Kellogg believes was the deciding factor behind his disastrous order for the Wehrmacht to strike south in August 1941 when it was a mere 200 miles from Moscow.Hitler only began to develop a detailed anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic ideology beginning in the second half of 1919 through his collaboration with Eckart and Rosenberg, who served as his early mentors. Mend confirmed Hitler's rapid political lurch from the far left to the far right in postwar Munich. When he heard Hitler speak publicly at the beginning of 1920, he thought, "Adi has changed his colors, the red lad!" In addition to borrowing anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic ideas from Eckart and Rosenberg, Hitler soon learned far-right concepts that castigated "Jewish Bolshevism" from the Aufbau ideologues Scheubner-Richter and Vinberg as well.

The Whites contributed more than energy and ideas to the National Socialist cause before 1923. It also provided money and manpower. Many who marched during the doomed Munich Putsch were Whites, as were many of the soldiers who fought alongside the Germans against the Bolsheviks during the Latvian Intervention of 1919. Boris Brazol, a white émigré in the United States funneled much-needed funds from industrialist Henry Ford and worked closely with Scheubner-Richter. Brazol, notably, was a contributor to Ford's anti-Semitic newspaper The Dearborn Independent and also translated Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer into English. More importantly, Kirill Romanov, exiled heir apparent to Tsardom in Russia, gave tremendous sums to the White-Nazi alliance. Many Whites supported his bid for power, and so did Hitler.

Sadly, many White émigrés opposed Kirill in favor of his cousin Nikolai who also aspired to Tsardom. The Nikolai faction, led by the émigré Nikolai Markov II, was Russian imperialist in nature and supported restoring Russia to its pre-1917 borders. Hitler and the Aufbau contingent preferred the more ethnocentric solution of petty nationalism in the defeated Soviet Union, with Russia, Ukraine, and other republics becoming independent entities. This impasse festered into acrimony and hatred among the Whites, and effectively prevented the invasion of the Soviet Union that they all so desperately wanted.

After the failed Putsch in 1923, White influence began to wane. Regardless, it never went away and, in some ways, enjoyed a resurgence in the 1930s with Alfred Rosenberg's success in the Nazi Party. However, if there is a flaw to The Russian Roots of Nazism , in my mind, it's that Kellogg fails to adequately address the issue of Lebensraum , or living space. He gives it minimal attention and quotes the famous passage in Mein Kampf Volume II (1926) in which Hitler insists the Germans " . . . shift to the soil policy of the future" and "have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states." Lebensraum, with its all imperial implications, clearly violates Aufbau 's ethnocentric notions of Nazifying Ukraine for the sake of the Ukrainians.

Kellogg seems to think it adequate to demonstrate that Hitler fully developed his Lebensraum ideas only after the 1923 Putsch. Thus, Kellogg abides by his thesis of the Russian roots of Nazism, that is, of how White émigré thought influenced early -- and not middle or late -- National Socialism. But this is too easy. If Aufbau ideas were truly the roots of Nazism, then why did Hitler reverse some of these ideas by the late 1920s? Kellogg doesn't quite tell us.

Overshadowing this, however, is Kellogg's assertion that Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 after his 1939 non-aggression pact with Stalin in part because of the feverish anti-Bolshevism and anti-Semitism of the pre-Putsch White émigrés. The pact had devastated the Whites that were still living in Germany at that time. However,

[T]he cooperation between Hitler and Stalin that so discomfited Germany's White émigré community did not last long. Hitler soon returned to his intense anti-Bolshevik roots, which he had largely developed during his close interaction with Aufbau in the early 1920s. Even while German armed forces were still engaged in the French campaign in June 1940, Hitler expressed his intention "to take action against the menace of the Soviet Union the moment our military position makes it at all possible." He issued the first directive for the invasion of the Soviet Union in August 1940 under the telling name Aufbau Ost (Reconstruction East). In titling his planned Soviet campaign Aufbau Ost, Hitler demonstrated the lasting impression that Aufbau's warnings against "Jewish Bolshevism" had made on his thinking.

Adding to this was how Rosenberg himself had urged Hitler to invade the Soviet Union as well.

Kellogg's most valuable and revolutionary contribution to our understanding of this time involves his admirable academic restraint. Rarely does he pass judgment on his subjects, and certainly never during the 1918-1923 period on which his book mostly focuses -- except in the few cases in which certain émigrés committed crimes such as embezzlement. Yes, in the last few pages, Kellogg rightly deplores the mass murder and extermination of Jews at the hand of Hitler -- although, interestingly, he very rarely uses the term "Holocaust." Rosenberg, who served as the State Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories during the war, greatly facilitated these horrific actions. But note how Kellogg insists on placing these actions within the larger context of Soviet atrocities from decades prior:

Rosenberg viewed his genocidal anti-Semitic actions in the occupied East as retaliation for the depredations of "Jewish Bolshevism." The November 18, 1941 press release dealing with Rosenberg's public assumption of the State Minister post stressed that the White émigré had entered politics since "he wanted to protect the German people from the same fate that he had lived through in Moscow."

And what were these depredations?

In Mein Kampf , Hitler again treated the "Jewish Bolshevik" annihilation of the nationalist Russian intelligentsia. He drew upon Aufbau and Eckartian thought to describe a ruthless Jewish drive for world domination. With the stage set for the "last great revolution," Hitler argued:

The democratic people's Jew becomes the blood-Jew and tyrant over people. In a few years he tries to exterminate the national intelligentsia and by robbing the peoples of their natural intellectual leadership makes them ripe for the slave's lot of permanent subjugation.

He further asserted, "The most frightful example of this kind is offered by Russia, where [the Jew] killed or starved about thirty million people with positively fanatical savagery, in part amid inhuman tortures."

Kellogg later quotes Mein Kampf , demonstrating how Hitler "combined völkisch German and anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic White émigré beliefs" when stating of "the Jew" that

[H]is ultimate goal is denationalization, the muddled half-breeding of the other peoples, the lowering of the racial level of the most superior, as well as the domination of this racial mush through the extermination of the völkisch intelligentsias and their replacement by the members of his own people.

Now, is any of this true? Kellogg doesn't say -- indeed, it's not his job to say. And we should be thankful for that. A Goldhagian approach, however, would be to dismiss it all as anti-Semitic lies and canards (just like The Protocols! ) and smear anyone swayed by them as being irredeemably racist and anti-Semitic.

But with enough research under our belt from historians such as Robert Conquest, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Kevin MacDonald, and others, we now know that Hitler and the White émigrés were much closer to the truth than not. Tens of millions were starved or murdered in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s, and millions more died in the Great Terror and the Gulag Archipelago. From such authors, we have also learned that a disproportionate amount of the Soviet leadership in all facets of its military and government was indeed Jewish. Soviet Jews as a bloc remained enthusiastic for the Soviet Union even when it was committing its greatest atrocities. Lenin himself (as reported by Yuri Slezkine in The Jewish Century ) attributed much of the success of the October Revolution to the Jews:

The fact that there were many Jewish intelligentsia members in the Russian cities was of great importance to the revolution. They put an end to the general sabotage that we were confronted with after the October Revolution. . . . The Jewish elements were mobilized . . . and thus saved the revolution at a difficult time. It was only thanks to this pool of a rational and literate labor force that we succeeded in taking over the state apparatus.

The Whites and the Nazis may have somewhat exaggerated Soviet crimes and often entertained fanciful conspiracy theories, but they were not wrong in linking Bolshevism to Jews and believing that the Soviet Union posed a dire threat to the West. By not shutting the door on such an interpretation of history, Kellogg indirectly allows the reader to develop a revisionist view of the Nazis as protectors rather than destroyers of civilization. Of course, it's extremely difficult to justify Nazi atrocities during World War II (and Kellogg does no such thing), but after we read The Russian Roots of Nazism we learn that it was even more difficult to justify the Soviet atrocities which were greater, took place beforehand, and caused millions of Whites to emigrate westward to begin with.

The Whites knew this and they made sure the Nazi knew this. And thanks to Michael Kellogg, we know it too.


stozi , says: Website December 31, 2020 at 7:52 am GMT • 11.0 hours ago

As an ethnic German of Russia and (against all reason perhaps) a Tsarist, I agree that this White influence on Nazis is an important story to tell. But there is a glaring gap in the chain of logic in this article. "they were not wrong in linking Bolshevism to Jews and believing that the Soviet Union". "Linked" is a very vague word. Yes, many Old Bolsheviks were jews, many of whom were precisely the ones purged and killed in the Great Terror. I'm sure there are those who claim Stalin was a jew, but come on. The famines we ordered personally by this non-Jewish Georgian dictator who surrounded himself with a disproportionate number of other Georgians/Transcaucasians in the halls of power. The famines were arranged/permitted as you like by confiscating grain to export and fund rapid industrialization in preparation for war, and, to discipline the peasantry as a class from Ukraine to Kazakhstan whatever their ethnic makeup. Jews were overrepresented earlier on largely because they didn't have any other options, they were banned from academia and various professions. Don't under-estimate the proportion of really poor jews in the Russian Empire up to this time who had no schemes but getting by. The biases of a bunch of pogromists shouldn't be taken as gospel truth. It's always easy to blame someone else for your defeat. In the same way, my fiercly anti-soviet orthodox co-religionists need to consider how the conduct of the pre-revolutionary church establishment allowed it's virtual abolishment to be broadly accepted. The church has always been flawed because it is made up of human beings, but people were truly sick of everything establishmentarian by 1917 and were, as a Tsarist one must admit, broadly apathetic or even happy when the last Emperor abdicated. Also remember that there are other far more intellectually interesting movements within the whites like the Eurasianists.

GMC , says: December 31, 2020 at 8:34 am GMT • 10.3 hours ago

When there are Ghosts in the Closet, one has to be very very careful about keeping them there. When other people know about those ghosts – they can use them – against you. I've hinted to a few Russian friends concerning the fact that Germany had been under the Jewish yoke and that Germany was under the impression that the Bolsheviks, that murdered and tortured millions, were in fact Jews – and some were from the US and helped fund the Revolution. I stopped my conversation after saying Hitler was very afraid of this Bolshevik Jewish – Soviet Union. I've never gotten a response from my friends , so I dropped it. Maybe, the Russian people are aware of these facts , but don't wish to bring up the past . Afterall, I'm a Gringo in Russia – what do I know look at all the skeletons in Washington's closet .

Olivier1973 , says: December 31, 2020 at 9:20 am GMT • 9.6 hours ago

Pure anti-Russian propaganda and bullshit. The roots of hitlerism are in Nietzsche.

gotmituns , says: December 31, 2020 at 9:53 am GMT • 9.0 hours ago

It doesn't really matter where the concept of Nazism started. What matters was/is the idea worked until the bankers/Jews started WW2 and we didn't get to see the outcome of how Hitler's revolution would have worked. I my own mind, it would he worked well and the Jews couldn't allow that because their game would have been up. That's why all these years later after the end of WW2, the anti Nazi/Hitler propaganda is still so intense.

Jon Halpenny , says: December 31, 2020 at 9:54 am GMT • 9.0 hours ago

In WW I Germany was not anti-Semitic to any significant degree. Jews had full rights in Germany which was in marked contrast to Tsarist Russia. East European Jews tended to regard the Germans as liberators when they advanced into parts of the Russian Empire.

Lloyd George later admitted one of the reasons for the Balfour Declaration was to secure support among east European Jews for the allies and prevent them supporting Germany.

Nicolas Bonnal , says: Website December 31, 2020 at 10:12 am GMT • 8.7 hours ago

Another stupid book serving the demonization of Russia.

Greg Bacon , says: Website December 31, 2020 at 11:04 am GMT • 7.8 hours ago

Russia is starting to recover from over 70 years of Bolshevik looting of her wealth, then anudda 112+ or so years of organized looting by Wall Street financial sharpies that helped those 'Russian' oligarchs steal hundreds of billions more.

Damn near everyone was a Jew, but we can't speak truths like that in the USA anymore, why that would be anti-Semitic!

The Silence of the Jews

After the collapse of the Soviet empire, a group of Zionists in Russia seemingly steeped in 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion', lied, cheated, stole, and murdered, their way into virtually all positions of power throughout the country. They used gangs (some of which probably included mossad agents) to intimidate and murder their opponents in order to gain control of between 70-85% of Russia's industries including most of its natural resources. They also took control of Russia's media which they then used to elect Boris Yeltsin as President of Russia despite the fact that he was a brain-dead, vodka soaked, alcoholic.

Within a matter of years these Russian traitors had become billionaires having stolen vast quantities of Russian assets. They exported as much as possible of their ill-gotten wealth to the Zionist state in Palestine just in case the Russians might ask for their money back.

https://therearenosunglasses.wordpress.com/the-silence-of-the-jews-documenting-silence-that-russian-oligarchs-are-israelis/

As for me, I'm still trying to figure out how one gets NAZI from the term National Socialist?

But you can get NAZI from this term, Ashke nazi.

While Russia's infrastructure has vastly improved over the last decade, the USA's has went to hell, since we spend that on propping up those Wall Street Casinos–owned by whom?–and fighting endless wars for the glory of Apartheid Israel.

Bardon Kaldian , says: December 31, 2020 at 11:05 am GMT • 7.8 hours ago
@stozi mp; similar cultures). This segment is very influential (or has become) & it is incurable in its hatred towards the Western historical identity (under West, I include all European Christendom, east & west, as well as their descendants).

There is no grand plan for anything. It's just that tribal Jewish activists, when they acquire power, tend to be bad news & they may form a hostile elite or sub-elite. Some Jewish persons have noticed that, too: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/american-jewrys-disgraceful-hypocrisy/

American Jewry's Disgraceful Hypocrisy

conatus , says: December 31, 2020 at 11:36 am GMT • 7.3 hours ago

The Russian Roots of Nazism perhaps would be more about the millions of Deaths caused by the Bolsheviks and inflicted on a seemingly passive population(much like US YTs now) from 1917 to 1935.R.J. Rummel, researched 'Democide' or 'the murder of a people by their own government' has the Bolseviks Communists murdering over 16 million of their own people.
Perhaps Hitler had a reason to fear the Communists and invade the Bolshevik Bloodlands. Hitler wanted to prevent the Communist takeover of Germany and the ensuing Democide of Germans. Thus the real Russian roots of Nazism.

https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE4.HTM
Chapter 2. 3,284,000 Victims: The Civil War Period 1917 to 1922 Figure 2.1. Range in Civil War Democide EstimatesTable 2.1. Civil War Period Democide and Other KilledFigure 2.2. Democide Components and Soviet War/RebellionKilled 1917-1922Appendix 2.1Table 2.A. 3,284,000 Victims: SourcesChapter 3. 2,200,000 Victims: The NEP Period 1923-1928Figure 3.1. Range in NEP Democide EstimatesTable 3.1. NEP Period DemocideFigure 3.2. Democide Components for Civil War andNEP PeriodsFigure 3.3. Soviet Democide and Annual Rate by PeriodAppendix 3.1Table 3.A. 2,200,000 Victims During the NEP Period: Sources, Calculations, and EstimatesChapter 4. 11,440,000 Victims: The Collectivization Period 1928-1935 Figure 4.1. Range of Collectivization Democide EstimatesTable 4.1. Collectivization Period DemocideFigure 4.2. Democide Components for Three PeriodsFigure 4.3. Soviet Democide and Annual Rate by Period

Jake , says: December 31, 2020 at 11:41 am GMT • 7.2 hours ago
@Rahan

Good grief, says Charlie Brown.

The ideas that formed the German National Socialist Worker's Party were all in place long before WW! started, which means that even if all (rather than a small minority of) Russian emigres had gone to Germany and had done so by 1918, the Russian impact on the formation of the Nazis would have been minimal.

Jake , says: December 31, 2020 at 12:26 pm GMT • 6.5 hours ago
@Olivier1973

The roots of Hitler are also in: Hegel, Bismarck, Frederick the Great, Luther, the late 19th century German 'back to nature/nudist/proto-hippie' movement, Germanic romanticizing of Germanic paganism.

The roots of Hitler also are set firmly in his Germanic adoration of the Anglo-Saxon empire, his desire to have a Continental Germanic version.

The roots of Hitler are anti-Slavic to the core.

04398436986 , says: December 31, 2020 at 12:32 pm GMT • 6.4 hours ago

This writer recasts Slezkine's "many Jewish intelligentsia members" as "the Jews", which is typical for Hitler-worshiping genocide inciters.

They will never write an honest word about the origins of Russian socialism, both intellectual and activist, which trace back to the 1850's and earlier, even before Marxism emerged. The members of these radical literary clubs were gentile blue-bloods; they came from army families and large landowning families, and had the best religious educations. They were disgusted by the misery of the peasants in the face of the opulence of manor and church.

Decades later, with the empire continuing to decline, some secular Jews politicized, joining many anti-tsarist liberal and socialist movements. Around the time of the revolution, some threw in with Lenin's Bolsheviks, while others, such as Lenin's would-be assassin, did not. After the revolution, being literate and good at logistics, they filled important roles. In a context of civil war, with much savagery on both sides, not to mention experience of pogroms and predations of such as the Black Hundreds, some of these Jews became terrible butchers.

But what of "the Jews"? Both before and after the revolution, they were fleeing by the hundred thousand. (A rapid influx of often dishevelled and not sweet-smelling Jews into Germany in the inter-war years created problems.)

This is not what people do when they feel their co-ethnics are assuming prominence, bringing hopes of good treatment and opportunity.

The "Judeo-Bolshevism" lie is deployed by those with dreams of personal advancement through butchery and piracy, in order to mesmerize the frustrated, disenchanted and ignorant.

for-the-record , says: December 31, 2020 at 2:04 pm GMT • 4.8 hours ago
@Carlton Meyer t even in 1915 (during the World War I anti-Germanism), 16 of the 53 top officials in the Minindel [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] had German names" In the 1880s, the Russian Germans (1.4 percent of the population) made up 62 percent of the high officials in the Ministry of Posts and Commerce and 46 percent in the War Ministry.

Germans were, occupationally and conceptually, the Jews of ethnic Russia (as well as much of Eastern Europe). Or rather, the Russian Germans were to Russia what the German Jews were to Germany -- only much more so.

The Russian Revolution, according to Slezkine, essentially served to replace the German elite by a Jewish one.

[Dec 29, 2020] The CIA Is Running Death Squads in Afghanistan

Dec 29, 2020 | outline.com

The war in Afghanistan, now in its 19th year, is the longest and most intractable of America's forever wars. There are now American soldiers fighting in Afghanistan who were born after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the ostensible casus belli . The American public has long ago grown tired of the war. A YouGov poll conducted in July of 2020 showed that 46 percent of Americans strongly supported withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, with another 30 percent saying they "somewhat" approved of troop withdrawal.

But this 76 percent majority is deceptive. Given the fact that America has a volunteer army and American casualties in Afghanistan remain sporadic, this is not an issue that the public is passionate about. An inchoate dissatisfaction is compatible either with disengagement or just a lack of interest. Conversely, those in the national security establishment who do passionately support the war are able to thwart political leaders who want a drawdown. Under both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, presidential efforts to disengage from Afghanistan and the larger Middle East were met with resistance from a foreign policy elite that sees any withdrawal as a humiliating defeat.

Trump tried to resolve the contradiction between his desire to remove troops and the foreign policy elite's commitment to the Afghan war by loosening the rules of war . The thinking of the Trump administration was that by unleashing the military and intelligence agencies, it could subdue the Taliban -- thus preparing the way for a drawdown of troops. Special priority was given to CIA-run covert operations using Afghan paramilitaries, with the belief that this would lead to a more sustainable war that didn't require American soldiers to participate in fighting.

A report in The Intercept , written by reporter Andrew Quilty, documents the horrifying consequences of this policy: Afghan paramilitary units, known as 01 and 02, have acted as death squads, launching raids against civilians that have turned into massacres. Many of these raids have attacked religious schools, the famous madrassas, leading to the death of children as young as 8 years old.

According to Quilty, "Residents from four districts in Wardak -- Nerkh, Chak, Sayedabad, and Daymirdad -- spoke of a string of massacres, executions, mutilation, forced disappearances, attacks on medical facilities, and airstrikes targeting structures known to house civilians. The victims, according to these residents, were rarely Taliban. Yet the Afghan unit and its American masters have never been publicly held accountable by either the Afghan or U.S. governments."

These raids all involve Afghan paramilitaries who are outside the control of the Afghan government and working in conjunction with American handlers who provide high-tech aid and direction, Quilty reports.

The units' American CIA advisers go by pseudonyms or call signs rather than names.They not only train Afghan unit members, but also choose their targets, which the Americans call "jackpots"; issue detailed pre-mission briefings; and accompany Afghan paramilitaries on the ground during raids. The Afghans and Americans are ferried to remote villages at night by American helicopters, and American assault aircraft hover overhead while they conduct their raids, providing lethal firepower that is sometimes directed at health clinics, madrassa dormitories, or civilian homes.

Despite providing detailed accounts of American-led war crimes, The Intercept 's report has been met with near-silence from the American media. Jake Tapper of CNN retweeted the article , but otherwise there is little indication that the American media cares.

As Intercept reporter Ryan Grim notes , "It's been two days since this story was published, and the mainstream media has been largely silent on it. Imagine if the media treated the My Lai massacre this way." (In fact, the mainstream press sat on whistleblower Ron Ridenhour's warnings about My Lai for a year before Seymour Hersh and the scruffy Dispatch News Service finally broke the silence.)

Grim also suggested that the Biden administration might want to bring justice to the perpetrators of these alleged war crimes. "One of the most outspoken proponents of bringing a fine legal eye to war has been Avril Haines, who will be Joe Biden's Director of National Intelligence," Grim observes. "She'll have the authority and the ability to discover who in the CIA was involved in these operations, and bring them to justice."

This is a forlorn hope given the Obama administration's failure to go after war crimes committed by the CIA under George W. Bush. Further, Biden himself is ambiguous on Afghanistan in a way that calls to mind Trump himself.

As Quincy Institute president Andrew Bacevich noted in The Nation earlier this month, Biden "wants to have it both ways" on the Afghan war. Biden will occasionally say, "These 'forever wars' have to end," but he will also say that America needs to keep a contingent of forces in Afghanistan. As Bacevich observes, "Biden proposes to declare that the longest war in US history has ended, while simultaneously underwriting its perpetuation." Biden's support for a light military footprint could very easily lead him to the same position as Trump: using covert CIA operations to maintain American power in Afghanistan with minimal use of uniformed troops. This is a recipe for more massacres.

The Nation

Writing in The Washington Post last month, veteran Afghanistan analyst Carter Malkasian made a compelling case that the United States is facing a "stark choice" between "complete withdrawal by May or keeping 2,500 troops in place indefinitely to conduct counterterrorism operations and to try to prevent the collapse of the Afghan government. There's no doubt that withdrawal will spell the end of the Afghan government that the United States has supported for 19 years."

Malkasian makes clear that the counterterrorism operations would merely be an exercise of staving off defeat, with no prospect of an end to the war. Given the enormous moral costs of this counterterrorism, unflinchingly described by The Intercept , the argument for complete withdrawal becomes stronger.

It's likely that Biden will continue the policy of previous presidents of kicking the can down the road by using covert CIA operators to fend off defeat. But Americans should have no illusions: That means perpetuation of horrific war crimes in a conflict that cannot be won.

[Dec 21, 2020] The USAID, Clintons and disaster capitalism in action

Notable quotes:
"... USAID led at that time by someone named Rajiv Khan, I think it was, and directed by Hill, comandeered the few landing spots at the airport for themselves preventing planes carrying Actual Aid -- you know, food, clothing, meds -- from landing and unloading. ..."
"... I have friends who lived in Haiti at the time and years after the disaster only 6 new residences had been built and the promised factories? As far as I know, never did get built. ..."
"... USAID seems to be about anything but AID. ..."
"... When pressed about the lack of progress made in the (housing) rebuilding efforts, including inabilities to provide shelter, Secretary of State Clinton said "Those who expect progress immediately are unrealistic and doing a disservice to the many people who are working so hard. ..."
Dec 21, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

NYCVG on Fri, 12/18/2020 - 1:55pm

USAID's misbehavior in Haiti

was mammoth and memorable.

USAID led at that time by someone named Rajiv Khan, I think it was, and directed by Hill, comandeered the few landing spots at the airport for themselves preventing planes carrying Actual Aid -- you know, food, clothing, meds -- from landing and unloading.

Then Bill was named "Ambassador to Haiti" and the situation Never improved.

I have friends who lived in Haiti at the time and years after the disaster only 6 new residences had been built and the promised factories? As far as I know, never did get built.

USAID seems to be about anything but AID.

wendy davis on Fri, 12/18/2020 - 4:58pm
oh, thank you for another

@NYCVG

good example! I vote Power and Sunstein to head USAID! i was a bit more than surprised that ann garrison never mentioned it's a CIA cut-out, to say the truth.

on edit: ach; you'd meant Bill Fuck over haiti Clinton!

' F*cking the Haitian 99%: Another Clinton Family Project ', October 27, 2015 by wendyedavis (longish, but this key excerpt)

"Sure, Bill and Hill love sweatshop industrial complexes (from nacla.org) more than houses for Haiti, and love HELP™ (comically ironic acronym):

"On September 20, Haitian prime minister Jean-Marc Bellerive, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the World Bank's International Finance Corporation announced their partnership with the South Korean garment firm Sae-A Trading Company to establish an industrial park that will create 10,000 garment assembly jobs in Haiti. Without a doubt, earthquake-ravaged Haiti needs jobs, mainly to provide the country's 1.3 million homeless with the means necessary to rebuild their destroyed homes.

While little progress has been made on Haiti's immense housing needs since the January 12 earthquake, Clinton assured the investing public that factory development was moving full steam ahead. These 10,000 jobs, she assured critics "are not just any jobs. These are good jobs with fair pay that adhere to international labor standards, . . . Haiti is open for business again."

Well, sure; at a $3.09 daily minimum wage (upped later to $5, but almost no one actually gets paid at that rate), what's not to love?

"When pressed about the lack of progress made in the (housing) rebuilding efforts, including inabilities to provide shelter, Secretary of State Clinton said "Those who expect progress immediately are unrealistic and doing a disservice to the many people who are working so hard."

Bill Clinton, UN Special Envoy to Haiti, has been equally optimistic about Haiti's cheap labor prospects, especially since the passing of the Haitian Economic Lift Program (HELP) in May. The bill would increase the amount of Haitian assembled goods that could be imported into the United States duty free. "This important step," Clinton said, "responds to the needs of the Haitian people for more tools to lift themselves from poverty, while standing to benefit U.S. consumers."

But my, oh, my; the Big Dog loves high-end resort tourism, too. The Marriott opening was well-attended by toffs, including Senn Penn, as I remember it.

[Dec 02, 2020] Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black4

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... I don't disagree with the idea that Trump should go (he is clearly incompetent for this position), but to think that Biden (personally also completely incompetent due to his health condition, and even before that; can you imagine this second rate politician summit with Macron, Merkel, or Putin even if we ignore his current health problems ), in some ways, will be an improvement is pretty optimistic. ..."
"... Biden administration will be especially dangerous in foreign policy where Russiagaters mafia clearly returned to power, (and chickenhawks like Nuland are in demand again; as well several other flavors of "national security parasites".) ..."
"... Both are puppets of approximately the same social force -- the union on neoliberal oligarchy and MIC (aka Uniparty.) Biden mafia simply will be slightly more polished, and less "in your face." But both are brutal gangsters, both domestically and on foreign arena. And that's pretty depressing. And one great service of Trump administration was that it exposed what is behind the fake facade. Biden will try to rebuild this fake facade, this Potemkin village again. that's all the difference. ..."
Dec 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

@William Gruff | Nov 30 2020 21:13 utc | 138

Bemildred , Dec 1 2020 11:06 utc | 160

When left becomes right, progressive become regressive, and fascist becomes anti-fascist, then we have to invent whole new vocabularies just to discuss the problems that humanity is facing. What is worse though is that upending the language of political society in this manner makes the amassed knowledge from the past less accessible to the present. I suppose that is the point though.
This is pretty interesting thought, thank you very much. Kind of Orwellian ""War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength," on a new, more sinister level as in "this manner makes the amassed knowledge from the past less accessible to the present."

But is reality Henry Ford quote "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black." is perfectly applicable to any US elections and political life in general.

Some commentators here for some reason think that Biden (yes, this semi-senile Biden, a marionette from the very beginning; senator from credit card companies; the worst enemy of working class in Congress ) is somehow preferable to Trump (yes, this Trump, a marionette of Zionists, the President who completely betrayed his electorate, best friend of billionaires and Pentagon; kind of Bush III replicating both intellectual level of Bush II and his policies, including a tax cut for the rich).

I don't disagree with the idea that Trump should go (he is clearly incompetent for this position), but to think that Biden (personally also completely incompetent due to his health condition, and even before that; can you imagine this second rate politician summit with Macron, Merkel, or Putin even if we ignore his current health problems ), in some ways, will be an improvement is pretty optimistic.

Biden administration will be especially dangerous in foreign policy where Russiagaters mafia clearly returned to power, (and chickenhawks like Nuland are in demand again; as well several other flavors of "national security parasites".)

Both are puppets of approximately the same social force -- the union on neoliberal oligarchy and MIC (aka Uniparty.) Biden mafia simply will be slightly more polished, and less "in your face." But both are brutal gangsters, both domestically and on foreign arena. And that's pretty depressing. And one great service of Trump administration was that it exposed what is behind the fake facade. Biden will try to rebuild this fake facade, this Potemkin village again. that's all the difference.

Posted by: likbez | December 01, 2020 at 07:04

"When left becomes right, progressive become regressive, and fascist becomes anti-fascist, then we have to invent whole new vocabularies just to discuss the problems that humanity is facing. What is worse though is that upending the language of political society in this manner makes the amassed knowledge from the past less accessible to the present. I suppose that is the point though."

Yes, that's what the gaslighing is all about, but the problem - as our self-designated betters are finding out now - is that you cannot run a sucessful competitive modern society that way, banana republics do not get to rule the world.

Even ... Henry Ford understood he had to take good care of his employees.

Biden is going to have his hands full without looking for any more trouble.

[Dec 01, 2020] psychohistorian

Dec 01, 2020 | www.lettinggobreath.com

| Dec 1 2020 1:32 utc | 148

[Dec 01, 2020] The Nuremberg Tribunal- 75 Years Later and Still the Basis for Humanity's Survival -- Strategic Culture

Dec 01, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

Matthew Ehret November 29, 2020 © Photo: Wikimedia

"The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that Civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captives to the judgement of law, is one of the most significant tributes that Power ever paid to reason."

-Justice Robert Jackson, Nov. 21, 1945

It is often forgotten what sort of a battle occurred after WWII to establish the Nuremberg Trials which gave the world a revolutionary code of law which even today offers many of the remedies to the Gordian Knots blocking our way to a peaceful future. By the end of the war, many European leaders of the allied nations wished to simply put leading Nazis against a wall to face a firing squad and return to "business as usual".

As I've outlined in many recent writings , it was only through the intensive efforts of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, and his leading allies in both the USA and Russia that a different course of action was decided upon and an official international tribunal was sanctioned that generated a total legal paradigm shift in international law that has been too easily taken for granted (due largely to the lack of effect these laws have had on post-WWII practice).

Among those revolutionary reforms included the unprecedented mandate that wars of aggression would henceforth be illegal in the eyes of the law. The tendency for those higher officials carrying out inhuman orders to escape responsibility for their actions or omissions of correct action were deemed insufficient defenses under the higher moral principle of "known or should have known".

The underlying assumption of these Nuremberg laws are: 1) "might does not make right" despite what generations of Hobbesians and Niescheans have chosen to believe and 2) that every individual is responsible for their decisions based not on the arbitrary standards of whatever degenerate society they live in but rather upon the belief in the intrinsic powers of reason and conscience which all humans have access to and are obliged to guide our actions in life.

Nazi philosophers and crown jurists like Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmidt whose thoughts have penetrated the western zeitgeist over the past 70 years would obviously find such concepts repugnant and deplorable.

The fact that the "free world" has ignored these foundations of international law has not changed the fact that they are still true.

Today, many of those powerful unipolar ideologues who managed the disastrous Cold War and post-Cold War geopolitical environment have attempted to erase the precedents of Nuremburg with such atrocities as Soros' International Criminal Court, and the "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine (R2P) in defense of "humanitarian wars" as seen in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria in recent years. The disturbing rise of unipolar R2P advocacy rampant among the British ruling class like Lord Mark Malloch Brown , Tony Blair and all of the Obama-era globalists surrounding Biden make Vladimir Putin and Sergey Lavrov's recent remarks at the 75 Anniversary Moscow conference celebrating the commencement of the Nuremberg Trials that much more important.

Putin and Lavrov Celebrate the 75 th Anniversary of Nuremberg Trials

At this event, Putin reminded the attendees of the importance of the historic tribunals which ran from November 21, 1945 to October – 1946, saying:

"We constantly refer to the lessons of the Nuremberg Trials; we understand their importance for defending the truths of historical memory, for making a well-founded and solid case against deliberate distortions and falsifications of World War II events, especially the shameless and deceitful attempts to rehabilitate and even glorify Nazi criminals and their accessories It is the duty of the entire international community to safeguard the Nuremberg Trials' decisions, because they concern the principles that underlie the values of the post-war world order and the norms of international law."

Putin's remarks were amplified by Sergey Lavrov who elaborated on the new legal paradigm created at Nuremberg which provides an obvious cure for the rise of WWII revisionism, sanitation of Nazism in Ukraine and beyond as well as the revival of many of the practices that made Nazism a viral threat to mankind.

"The Nuremberg Trials -- an example of international criminal justice -- proved that justice can be achieved with a professional approach based on broad interstate cooperation, consent and mutual respect. Clearly, the Nuremberg Tribunal's legacy is not limited to law, but has enormous political, moral and educational value. A strong vaccination against the revival of Nazism in all its forms and manifestations was made 75 years ago. Unfortunately, the immunity to the brown plague that was developed in Nuremberg has seriously worn off in some European countries. Russia will continue to vigorously and consistently oppose any attempts to falsify history, to glorify Nazi criminals and their henchmen, and to oppose the revision of the internationally recognized outcomes of World War II, including the Nuremberg rulings."

So What Happened at Nuremberg?

Amidst the ashes of WWII, a major battle was waged between those deep state forces that had funded fascism as a "solution to the woes of the great depression" vs those genuine patriots who understood that the very fabric of empire and its associated financial, cultural and legal paradigm had to be destroyed and replaced with a paradigm more befitting human civilization.

Among the leading representative of the patriotic forces loyal to FDR's anti-colonial vision was a man who has been nearly lost to history named Robert H. Jackson (1892-1954). Jackson would serve as Franklin Roosevelt's most trusted legal advisor who first made a name for himself working closely with Ferdinand Pecora in prosecuting dozens of high level Wall Street financiers and pro-fascist industrialists who orchestrated the depression of 1929 and the later coup and assassination attempts against FDR in 1933-1934. After proving himself in combat, Jackson arose to become U.S. Solicitor General (1938-1940), Attorney General (1940-41) and leading member of the Supreme Court from 1941 until his death in 1954.

Knowing that the deep state coup that ousted Vice-President Henry Wallace and imposed Anglophile tool Harry Truman onto the USA might destroy the hopes for a post-WWII order of peaceful cooperation as outlined by the United Nations Charter, Judge Jackson took the lead and organized the Nuremberg Tribunals delivering the opening speech on November 21, 1945:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/L50OZSeDXeA?feature=oembed

One of the prime motives behind the hearings was the intention to give legal meaning and action to the universal ideals conveyed in the United Nations' Charter. This charter encapsulated the principles that FDR and Henry Wallace outlined repeatedly in the Four Freedoms . These freedoms asserted that all humankind regardless of race, sex, creed, or nationality would: 1) have the freedom from want, 2) freedom to worship as one's conscience dictated, 3) freedom from fear, and 4) freedom of speech. If international law could tolerate wars of aggression, or if abdication of responsibility for ones' criminal deeds could be tolerated on the basis of "I was just following orders", then the UN Charter could carry little weight indeed.

As Jackson wrote in his Summer 1945 report to the President justifying the creation of the Nuremberg Tribunal:

"We therefore propose to charge that a war of aggression is a crime, and that modern international law has abolished the defense that those who incite or wage it are engaged in legitimate business. Thus, may the forces of law be mobilized on the side of peace."

During the course of the 11 month proceedings, not only were leading cabinet members, generals, lawyers and other high officials put on trial, but the deepest facets of natural law vs Nietschean "law of the strongest" was investigated with Platonic rigor as laid out in the brilliant award-winning film Judgement at Nuremberg (1960).

https://www.youtube.com/embed/lbqDuUjm4aU?feature=oembed

Due to the leadership of Justice Jackson, the treatment of INTENTION and conspiracy was made the primary focus in the pursuit of justice and cause of criminal guilt. This was not a popular approach then or today for the simple fact that our world is shaped by many top down forces that want their victims' minds to be forever trapped in the material bottom up world of deductive/inductive logic where immaterial causal intentions and ideas can never be found. For anyone wishing to pursue this fruitful line of thinking further, I suggest reading Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka.

When one adopts the view that intentions and conspiracies (i.e.: the effect of intentions + ideas when put into action) ARE NOT a driving force of politics and life, then we forever loose our ability to judge truthfulness in any serious manner. This was the philosophical premise of leading Nazi financier Hjalmar Schacht, whose moral relativism and cold calculating principles of economics directly justified the cheap labor camps that worked millions to death in the German war production effort. This same philosophy again found fertile soil in the post-1971 consumer society that revived the logic of cheap labor production under the age of "cheapest price is the law" globalization.

Quoting Schacht who said "Truth is any story that succeeds", Justice Jackson quipped "I think you can score many more successes, when you want to lead someone, if you don't tell them the truth- than if you do tell them the truth".

Laying out the principled intention of the trial to the American people, Jackson said:

"The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched .

"The case as presented by the United States will be concerned with the brains and authority in back of all the crimes. These defendants were men of a station and rank which does not soil its own hands with blood. They were men who knew how to use lesser folk as tools. We want to reach the planners and designers, the inciters and leaders .

"It is not the purpose in my part of this case to deal with the individual crimes. I am dealing with the common plan or design for crime and will not dwell upon individual offenses. My task is only to show the scale on which these crimes occurred, and to show that these are the men who were in the responsible positions and who conceived the plan and design which renders them answerable, regardless of the fact that the plan was actually executed by others .

"The Charter recognizes that one who has committed criminal acts may not take refuge in superior orders nor in the doctrine that his crimes were acts of state .

"The real complaining party at your bar is Civilization . The refuge of the defendants can only be their hope that International Law will lag so far behind the moral sense of mankind that conduct which is crime in the moral sense must be regarded as innocent in law. Civilization asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of importance."

Today, the world sits once more on the brink of a new world order, and the emergence of a governing system that is shaped entirely on the same social Darwinistic/Nietschean operating system that gave rise to fascism in WWII. The same denial of universal truth that animated the minds of a Schacht, Goebbels, Heidegger or Schmidt has become hegemonic among western academia as well.

Very few statesmen have had the courage and insight to resist this unipolar anti-nation state system, but among those who have we are fortunate to have found the current leader of Russia and his allies who in many ways are playing the same historic role as the one played 75 years earlier by Justice Robert Jackson, Henry Wallace and President Roosevelt. Whether the rest of the world wakes up in time to recognize the superiority of the multipolar alliance over the regressive order of the unipolarists carrying us ominously towards World War 3 remains to be seen.

[Nov 30, 2020] MKULTRA The CIA's War On The Human Mind -

Sep 09, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

MKULTRA & The CIA's War On The Human Mind by Tyler Durden Tue, 09/08/2020 - 22:20 Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print

Authored by Jason Morgan via The Mises Institute,

[Review of Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2019)]

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has a fearsome reputation. The author and executor of countless coups and political assassinations, the CIA is notorious for waterboarding, "extraordinary rendition," regime change, kidnapping, narcotics smuggling, financing of guerrilla wars, and many other unsavory activities around the world, including against Americans, even inside the United States .

But "fearsome" does not mean "flawless." The CIA has failed at least as often as it has succeeded, and sometimes the failures are so flagrant -- such as sending thousands of anticommunist guerrilla fighters behind enemy lines in Korea, Eastern Europe, China, and Southeast Asia during the Cold War, where nearly all of them died -- that CIA insiders wryly refer to their organization as "Clowns In Action."

Which is it? Is the CIA a dastardly menace or a hotbed of horrible mistakes? If Stephen Kinzer's new book, Poisoner in Chief , is any indication, the answer is both.

A veteran reporter on foreign conflicts such as those in Rwanda, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Iran, Kinzer is a former New York Times correspondent and, most famously, the author of the 2006 bestseller Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq . In his latest effort he brings his analytical skills to bear on perhaps the most disturbing CIA project of them all: MKULTRA, the top-secret, long-running effort to find a method for controlling the human mind.

"History's most systematic search for techniques of mind control," Kinzer writes, was a by-product of World War II.

At the end of 1942, a University of Wisconsin bacteriologist named Ira Baldwin - "America's first bio-warrior" and a part-time Quaker preacher - was loaned to Washington (with the blessing of the University of Wisconsin president) in order to set up and run a bioweapons program for the United States military (p. 16). Based out of Camp Detrick in Maryland, the Baldwin lab cranked out bioweapons for possible use against Allied enemies. In one of Baldwin's bigger projects, shipment of tons of anthrax spores, ordered by Winston Churchill for potential use against the Nazis, was approved by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and almost ready for delivery when the Germans surrendered on May 7, 1945 (p. 19).

For many, even for Quaker preachers, World War II cleared away the last of the psychological hurdles against unleashing bioweapons against an enemy. Kinzer's book tells the tale of how the targeting of unsuspecting populations was later justified by the bigger war, the Cold War, which followed the demise of the Third Reich.

https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890

The ruined Third Reich provided much of the original brainpower for MKULTRA. Immediately after World War II, the CIA -- formed out of the Office of War Information in 1945 -- was faced with a choice. The Germans and the Japanese had been conducting advanced experiments on germ warfare and other forms of biological weaponry. Should the Allies prosecute as war criminals the scientists involved with such projects, or hire them as expert advisors? With the Cold War starting and the Soviets looming as an unpredictable enemy, the CIA, with the tacit approval of the few members of the United States Congress who were allowed to know even the existence of the Central Intelligence Agency, decided to make use of the bioweapon expertise of erstwhile foes in order to counter the new adversary in Moscow.

For example, Kurt Blome, the Nazis' director of biowarfare research and development whose work had been championed by Heinrich Himmler, was acquitted, by American political fiat, at the Doctors' Trial in Nuremberg in 1947 and sent to work - as part of Operation Paperclip designed mainly to bring German rocket scientists to the US - at Camp Detrick (pp. 20 -- 24).

It was at Camp Detrick that Blome encountered a rising star in the CIA, Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb, a bacteriological specialist who had been a star student of Ira Baldwin's at Wisconsin, is the main figure in Kinzer's book. His career is virtually synonymous with MKULTRA. Under the direction of Gottlieb, the CIA's laboratories at Camp Detrick transitioned from R&D on bioweapons -- often using unwitting American subjects, such as in 1950 when a US Navy minesweeper "specially equipped with large aerosol hoses" spent six days spraying the Serratia marcescens bacterium into the San Francisco fog, infecting some eight hundred thousand people (pp. 37 -- 38) -- to drugs which could be used for mind control. (MKNAOMI, MKULTRA's sister CIA project, was also tasked with finding poisons and biotoxins which the CIA and the US government could use in various operations.) Gottlieb provided the big ideas into which to fit Blome's nefarious knowledge of mass murder by bacillus. Gottlieb became, virtually overnight and with the help of former Nazi doctors, America's "poisoner in chief."

The CIA's mind control program, which was assuming a bigger and bigger importance as fears of Soviet brainwashing grew in the US, was originally called Operation Bluebird and was personally overseen by CIA higher-up Allen Dulles. (47)

At first, the Bluebird team experimented with "hypnosis, electroshock, and sensory deprivation," along with drugs like sodium amytal, at CIA sites in "secret prisons in Germany and Japan," looking for a way to extract information out of POWs and captured spies (pp. 44, 48 -- 49). But Dulles was unsatisfied with the results and decided to give the young CIA recruit Sidney Gottlieb control of Bluebird's updated iteration: Operation Artichoke (pp. 51 -- 52). The goal of Artichoke was to do whatever it took to get prisoners to divulge military and state secrets to the CIA. The Cold War would brook nothing short of full-scale war against the human mind.

Dulles became deputy director of central intelligence three days after launching Artichoke in 1951, and Gottlieb, invisible to the outside world, was given virtually unlimited rein to carry out any experiments thought necessary to achieve mind control (p. 51). This drive to achieve total operational control over the human psyche eclipsed all reality and tactical limitation . If the US didn't win the race to the mind control method, many in the CIA thought, the entire American population lay vulnerable to mental enslavement by the Soviets. Dulles, Kinzer writes, despite a disastrously unsuccessful three-year "Artichoke" attack on a Bulgarian political prisoner named Dmitri Dimitrov, "had convinced himself not only that mind control techniques exist but that Communists had discovered them, and that this posed a mortal threat to the rest of the world" (pp. 52 -- 53).

Mind control was the pressing need, but nothing brought it within reach. Technique after technique, drug after drug, was tried on prisoners, but to no avail. In frustration, Artichoke agents under Gottlieb upped the ante, turning to marijuana, cocaine, and then heroin as possible catalysts of CIA-directed, anti-Soviet brainwashing. As part of Artichoke, a University of Rochester psychology professor was given a grant by the US Navy to test heroin on his students. The control of the mind remained as elusive as ever, despite the massive dosing of the Rochester student population with opiates. Nothing seemed to have the potential to crack open the mind for the CIA (p. 59).

Someone in Artichoke suggested using mescaline after the other narcotics failed, and this gave Sidney Gottlieb an idea. He remembered hearing about a drug called LSD which Dr. Albert Hofmann had discovered during an experiment at Sandoz laboratories in Basel, Switzerland, in 1943. Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), an ergot enzyme, produced extraordinary and disturbing psychological effects, Dr. Hofmann found when he ingested some and recorded the drug's effects. Washington learned of Hofmann's discovery in 1949, and one of the chemical specialists in the US military complex told Gottlieb of the new substance (pp. 34 -- 35) In 1951, Gottlieb asked Harold Abramson, who had been a physician in the Chemical Warfare Service during World War II, to administer LSD to him. Gottlieb experienced the same psychedelic state as Dr. Hofmann had described. Other subjects were tested, as well, not all of them wittingly, and all seemed to exhibit similar reactions. LSD most definitely altered the mind (pp. 60 -- 61). Gottlieb was convinced that he had found the magical drug which would allow the CIA to control the psyche , and therefore to beat the Soviets at (what Allen Dulles, Gottlieb, and many others at CIA thought, at least, was) the Soviets' own game.

The experiments on human subjects followed rapidly after Gottlieb's conversion to belief in the powers of LSD. These experiments often ended in death, often by murder. One study quoted by Kinzer reports that

in 1951 a team of CIA scientists led by Dr. Gottlieb flew to Tokyo .Four Japanese suspected of working for the Russians were secretly brought to a location where the CIA doctors injected them with a variety of depressants and stimulants .Under relentless questioning, they confessed to working for the Russians. They were taken out into Tokyo Bay, shot and dumped overboard. (p. 64)

The CIA carried out similar experimentation and executions in Korea and Germany (p. 64). Gottlieb was usually personally involved.

Throughout the 1950s the experimentation continued. An American artist named Stanley Glickman was lured to a bar near his studio in Paris by CIA agents in 1951 and a chemical was slipped into his drink. Glickman began to hallucinate wildly. He fled in a state of panic and remained in his Paris apartment for the next ten months in paranoid hiding until his family came to take him home, and then he spent the rest of his life as a near invalid. The chemical which the CIA had slipped into Glickman's drink was almost certainly LSD, and Glickman, Kinzer suggests, had been chosen by the CIA because he had just recovered from hepatitis and the Artichoke team was conducting an experiment on the effects of hepatic infection on the efficacy of LSD (pp. 66 -- 67)

Things got worse from there. In 1952, the CIA commissioned underworld denizen and former vice cop George Hunter White to run a human-subjects experiment site at 81 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village, New York (pp. 74 -- 75). White's job was to bring to the CIA's apartment "expendables" on whom Gottlieb and his team could test LSD. White "knew the whores, the pimps, the people who brought in the drugs," as one of Gottlieb's MKULTRA colleagues later explained, and this made him invaluable for procuring the "drug users, petty criminals, and others who could be relied upon not to complain about what had happened to them" when the CIA's experiments were finished (pp. 76 -- 77). Many of these "expendables" suffered nervous breakdowns, and some died.

In order to keep the supply of LSD flowing, CIA agents went to Basel, where LSD had been discovered, and tried to buy all the LSD in stock. Allen Dulles authorized a $240,000 outlay to pay for it (p. 86). Sandoz held the patent for Hofmann's 1943 discovery, but Sandoz wanted nothing to do with the troublesome substance and so Gottlieb, freed of any need to scruple over IP infringement, tasked US pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly with making LSD in the States (pp. 85 -- 86) With their mind control serum in production, MKULTRA agents could focus on how to dose experimental subjects. The CIA even hired a professional magician, John Mulholland, to teach Gottlieb and his agents how to deliver LSD into unsuspecting subjects' drinks and food without being detected (pp. 89 -- 94)

Gottlieb recruited a Kentucky addiction specialist, Dr. Harry Isbell, to test LSD and new mind-altering drugs on prisoners and patients. More lives were destroyed (pp. 94 -- 96). Among the victims of another of Gottlieb's agent-doctors was none other than James "Whitey" Bulger, the mafioso who, along with "nineteen other inmates" at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, beginning in 1957 "was given LSD nearly every day for fifteen months, without being told what it was" (pp. 98 -- 99). Bulger was plagued for the rest of his life with nightmares, suicidal thoughts, and "deep depression" (p. 98). Bulger, who had been told that he was taking part in experiments designed to find a cure for schizophrenia, did not learn the truth about what had happened until 1979 (pp. 263 -- 64).

The human toll of Gottlieb's MKULTRA experiments continued to mount. One of Gottlieb's closest associates in the project, Frank Olson -- a bacteriologist trained at the University of Wisconsin who had also been recruited for the CIA by Gottlieb's mentor Ira Baldwin -- began to express doubts about what the MKULTRA team was doing. He told his wife that he had made a "terrible mistake" in his work (p. 114). He shared his misgivings with his CIA colleagues as well. Olson's conscience appeared to be getting the better of him, and he became a liability to the team.

In late 1953, Gottlieb surreptitiously dosed Olson with LSD at a backwoods MKULTRA gathering, "Deep Creek Rendezvous," outside Camp Detrick (p. 113). Olson spiraled into a frightening disorientation, and early in the morning on November 28, 1953 -- a few days after Thanksgiving -- Olson "fell or jumped" from a window of the Statler Hotel in Manhattan, dying few moments after hitting the concrete below . Another MKULTRA agent, Gottlieb's lieutenant Robert Lashbrook, was the only other person in the room when Olson "fell or jumped" (pp. 120 -- 21). Lashbrook told the New York City police that Olson had jumped out of the window and Olson's death was originally designated a suicide, but the Olson family eventually grew suspicious and an investigation was carried out, including a new autopsy on Olson's body. The forensic pathologist, after a month's examination of the corpse, declared: "I think Frank Olson was intentionally, deliberately, with malice aforethought, thrown out of that window" (p. 250). Wounds on Olson's body were consistent with methods taught in CIA manuals for incapacitating people and then killing them in order to make their deaths look self-inflicted.

Gottlieb and MKULTRA were shaken by Olson's demise, but they carried on with their work. They spent the next few years looking for magic mushrooms in Mexico (157); arranging suicide capsules for American agents, including U-2 pilot Gary Powers (who chose not to use his when he was shot down over the Soviet Union) (pp. 172 -- 75); attempting, at the order of then attorney general Robert Kennedy, to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro (after exploding cigars and exploding conch shells were ruled out, Gottlieb tried with a wetsuit laced with fungi and bacteria) (p. 184); and hooking Allen Ginsberg and other radicals on LSD (pp. 188 -- 90). Gottlieb personally delivered to the American embassy in Leopoldville in the Congo poisons that Gottlieb had developed to assassinate Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, but the Belgians and the Africans beat the CIA to it (pp. 176 -- 80).

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Gottlieb's career brought ruin and suffering to untold numbers of people, many of them innocent. He retired from the CIA in 1973 after receiving the Distinguished Intelligence Medal (p. 211). Lifelong devotees of folk dance, Gottlieb and his wife, Margaret, moved to the countryside in rural Virginia and attempted to blend in with the small community there, volunteering, dancing, and experimenting with radical ecology. However, "investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam," learned of the MH-CHAOS program targeting Americans, and the Congress was forced to act. Gottlieb's career, long a well-kept secret, was being brought into the open, and his retirement would therefore be far from peaceful.

But there were still many who tried to cover up what Gottlieb and the other MKULTRA agents had done. In 1975, after the outcry caused by the Hersh reporting, President Gerald Ford deputized Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to chair a commission on the CIA. The new CIA director, William Colby, was remarkably frank. Colby informed the Rockefeller Commission that "the CIA had conducted LSD experiments that resulted in deaths. Later he referred to assassination plots" (p. 216). Nelson Rockefeller, attempting to prevent the CIA director from revealing too much, buttonholed Colby later: "Bill, do you really have to present all this material to us?" (p. 216).

In 1977, in the wake of the Church Report on further American intelligence excesses, Senator Edward Kennedy, Robert's brother, spurred on by some documents which had been discovered as the result of a FOIA request (Gottlieb had ordered all MKULTRA files burned, but some undetected copies remained), called Admiral Stansfield Turner to testify before Congress on MKULTRA. The walls were closing in. Gottlieb himself was eventually forced to testify -- albeit in a closed-room setting his lawyer had helped arrange -- but Gottlieb essentially pleaded amnesia (nearly all of his answers to questions about MKULTRA were some version of "I do not recall") and the matter seemed to end there.

Still, the skeletons in Gottlieb's closet would not go away. In 1984 Gottlieb agreed to meet with the family of Frank Olson, the former MKULTRA colleague who had "fallen or jumped" from his Manhattan hotel room in 1953. Eric Olson, Frank Olson's son, was unconvinced by Gottlieb's explanation for the "accident," and, after Frank Olson's widow and Eric's mother passed away, ordered Frank's body exhumed in 1994. As information about MKULTRA built in the public's awareness, other cases were reopened, including that of Stanley Glickman. (257) The courts were now involved and Gottlieb could not count on the CIA to get him out of his legal trouble. Gottlieb pushed back the trial for Glickman's murder as long as he could, and then, in early March, 1999, Sidney Gottlieb died.

Like Frank Olson, it was not officially revealed whether or not the death had been a suicide (p. 259).

Stephen Kinzer's Poisoner in Chief is a highly readable, thoroughly researched introduction to the life and work of one of America's most unknown, and yet infamous, government agents. Kinzer is to be thanked for his plainspoken, courageous book. Even those who have studied the CIA and the various schemes and crimes which "the Agency" has committed over the past seventy-five years will be surprised by some of the information Kinzer relates. To see in one volume a rendering of just some of the lives ruined by just one CIA program, MKULTRA, is a sobering revelation.

Sidney Gottlieb, the person directly responsible for much, if not most, of the MKULTRA devastation over more than twenty years, remains as mysterious at the end of Kinzer's volume as at the beginning, however. By all accounts Gottlieb was a good student from a stable family. Kinzer speculates that perhaps Gottlieb's having been rejected for military service in World War II -- Gottlieb stuttered and had a clubfoot -- left him unsatisfied and impatient to prove his patriotism, an urgent task for the son of immigrant Jews (p. 50). Gottlieb was heavily involved in New Age mysticism and meditation and appears to have expended considerable energy psychologically compartmentalizing his "work," so there are indications that he was aware that the experiments he and his MKULTRA team were carrying out were, at best, unethical, and objectively speaking often outright crimes.

But Gottlieb was hardly alone in his endeavors, and the explanation that Gottlieb, Allen Dulles, and many others in the CIA gave -- to themselves and to each other, and to the world around when pressed -- makes the most sense. They had a country to defend, they faced an enemy of unprecedented cruelty in the Soviet Union, and they were willing to do whatever it took, even sacrificing innocent people, to keep Americans as a whole from falling under the spell of communist mind control.


[Nov 28, 2020] "Phoenix a civilian assassination program that also included torture during the Vietnam War "neutralized" 81,740 people suspected of VC membership, of whom 26,369 were killed"

Nov 28, 2020 | off-guardian.org

newpage , Nov 26, 2020 6:36 PM Reply to Edwige

"Phoenix Programme"

~ a civilian assassination program that also included torture during the Vietnam War ~

"The Phoenix Program program designed, coordinated, and executed by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), United States special operations forces , special forces operatives from the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam and the Republic of Vietnam's (South Vietnam) security apparatus during the Vietnam War.

"The program was designed to identify and destroy the Viet Cong (VC) via infiltration, torture, capture, counter-terrorism, interrogation, and assassination. The CIA described it as "a set of programs that sought to attack and destroy the political infrastructure of the Viet Cong".The Phoenix Program was premised on the idea that infiltration had required local support from non-combat civilian populations, which were referred to as the "political branch" that had purportedly coordinated the insurgency.

"Phoenix "neutralized" 81,740 people suspected of VC membership, of whom 26,369 were killed"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program

[Nov 28, 2020] Both Allen Dulles and his brother were shareholders in the Boston/United Fruit Company and one of their first "happenings" was to defeat the threat of redistribution and secure land for their own private profit.

Nov 28, 2020 | off-guardian.org


Moneycircus
, Nov 26, 2020 5:47 PM Reply to Moneycircus

"During the Cold War, the vast majority of states overthrown were left-leaning or socialist governments aligned with the Eastern Bloc."

I take issue with this. The great movement after the collapse of the British Empire was autonomy and, in attempting to throw off the plantation class, that meant land distribution as a response to popular pressure, regardless of political colour.

In short it was nationalism, which can be left or right.

As for the U.S. it was just business. Both Allen Dulles and his brother were shareholders in the Boston/United Fruit Company – and one of their first "happenings" was to defeat the threat of redistribution and secure land for their own private profit .

Even more important than land distribution was equal access to natural resources , beginning with water and firewood and extending to minerals. That is why Bolivia's Evo Morales came to power and why he was ousted.

U.S. regime change was primarily the CIA acting as muscle for the people who had founded it: the Wall Street bankers, lawyer and associated corporations.

"Left leaning" was the excuse. This is why the CIA and State Department armed Castro while halting weapon sales to Fulgencio Batista, as documented by U.S. ambassador to Cuba at the time, Earl T. Smith.

The only explanation for this is that the CIA expected Castro to become another Batista or it wanted a boogeyman in the western hemisphere as a justification for actions it had in mind.

There is even a convincing argument that the Bay of Pigs was a ruse in order to provide leverage against JFK. Nov 26, 2020 6:38 PM Reply to Moneycircus

Agreed. At the same time that Rockefeller and Kissinger were pushing for an opening with communist China and forging business deals with Chinese officials, they were also working to orchestrate a coup against socialist Salvador Allende in Chile. Allende wasn't aligned with the Eastern Bloc. He was a threat because of his nationalization program and its impact on corporate interests in Chile, banking and copper mining among others. The 'communist' thing was a pretext, as it had been when they overthrew Arbenz in Guatemala.

For Rockefeller, Kissinger and associates it was simply about serving Wall Street interests, and the CIA was their enforcement arm. They have been willing to work with communists, fascists, and anyone else who help advance their economic and global objectives. However, I don't doubt that many CIA covert operators doing the dirty work during the Cold War were true believers in the anti-communist crusade.

Researcher , Nov 26, 2020 6:42 PM Reply to Moneycircus

Most of it's a ruse. I expect Bay of Pigs was some kind of intentional ruse. Didn't JFK reject Operation Northwoods in favor of keeping Cuba communist to fuel the Cold War?

I don't even think JFK was planning to disband the CIA. I just think LBJ was far more powerful within the cryptocracy and wanted JFK and Bobby Kennedy out of the way because he was an ambitious psychopath. The Killing of the King was a ritual to inflict psychological trauma on the American public and to show those working within the system that nobody is safe.

Moneycircus , Nov 26, 2020 6:53 PM Reply to Researcher

For all the talk about the defining role of the American corporation, the country's wealth was largely secured by supplanting European empires. That did not happen once the "west" had been settled or the internal opportunities exhausted -- it anticipated the decline of European empires, starting well before the Monroe Doctrine of 1823.

To put it another way, how many of America's ruling families were not imperialists?

Grafter , Nov 26, 2020 5:13 PM

After reading that it is clear we will be entering a dark and dangerous era where those who own and control the media , corrupt the foundations and operations of their own government and believe in their psychopathic doctrine of "exceptionalism" will ensure that we will be taken to the edge of a precipice. Their greed for power and financial gain is limitless and as evidenced by the Covid scam we appear to be helpless regards whatever malign agenda they wish to implement.

[Nov 25, 2020] Nagorno-Karabakh is Tragic but Not America's Problem - Antiwar.com Original

Nov 25, 2020 | original.antiwar.com

Nagorno-Karabakh is Tragic but Not America's Problem

Let Other Governments Try To Resolve the Intractable Conflict

by Doug Bandow Posted on November 25, 2020

In Washington foreign conflicts are to policymakers what lights are to moths. The desire to take the U.S. into every political dispute, social collapse, civil war, foreign conflict, and full-scale war seems to only get stronger as America's failures accumulate.

There may be no better example than the battle between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the latter's claim to the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, contained within Azerbaijan but largely populated by ethnic Armenians. Distant from the US and Europe, the struggle matters most to nearby Georgia, Turkey, Iran, and Russia.

The impact on Americans is minor and indirect at best. Yet there is wailing and gnashing of teeth in Washington that the US is "absent" from this fight. Send in the bombers! Or at least the diplomats! Candidate Joe Biden predictably insisted that America should be leading a peace effort "together with our European partners," without indicating what that would mean in practice.

The roots of the conflict, like so many others, go back centuries. Control of largely Muslim Azerbaijan and Christian Armenia passed among Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and Russian Empire. After the Russian Revolution the two were independent and fought over N-K's status, before both were absorbed by the Soviet Union. Nagorno-Karabakh's ethnic Armenian population began pressing for transfer to Armenia during the U.S.S.R.'s waning days. After the latter collapsed in 1992 the two newly independent nations again fought, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees, and Armenia grabbed the disputed land as well as even larger adjacent territory filled with ethnic Azerbaijanis.

A ceasefire froze the bitter conflict, leaving the conquered territory under Armenian control. Although Yerevan's gain was tenuous, unrecognized by the rest of the world and dependent upon a geographic corridor between Armenia and N-K, the government, largely in response to internal political pressures, grew steadily more aggressive and unwilling to honor previous commitments. Violent clashes mixed with ineffective talks between the two states.

With no prospect of resolution, despite long-standing diplomatic efforts through the so-called Minsk Process, involving America and France, among others, Azerbaijani forces, relying on Turkey, employing Syrian mercenaries, and utilizing Israeli-made drones, launched an offensive in September. With Yerevan losing troops and territory, Moscow brokered a new ceasefire, which required Armenia's withdrawal from areas conquered a quarter century ago. The transportation corridor is to be policed by Russian peacekeeping forces; Turkish officials will help monitor the ceasefire.

The result was jubilation in Baku and riots in Yerevan. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, under political siege, declared: "This is not a victory, but there is no defeat until you consider yourself defeated, we will never consider ourselves defeated and this shall become a new start of an era of our national unity and rebirth." More accurate was Azerbaijani President Ilham Alyev's assessment: "This [ceasefire] statement constitutes Armenia's capitulation. This statement puts an end to the years-long occupation. This statement is our Glorious Victory." With Pashinyan's authority in tatters and Alyev triumphantly enjoying a surge in popular support, hostilities could easily explode again.

Why would any sane American want to get in the middle of this fight?

Demands that Washington "do something" ignore three important realities. The first is that the conflict has nothing to do with the US and threatens no serious American interests. The fighting is tragic, of course, as are similar battles around the world. However, this volatile region is dominated by Iran, Russia, and Turkey. Iran previously supported Armenia, Turkey strongly backed Azerbaijan, and Russia has good relations with both, including a defense treaty with Yerevan which Moscow deemed not to cover contested territory, meaning N-K.

Which of these powers, all essentially American adversaries – despite Ankara's continued membership in the transatlantic alliance – dominates which neighbor is a matter of indifference to Washington. It simply doesn't matter, and certainly isn't worth fighting over. Once US officials would have preferred Turkey over Iran and Russia, but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has taken his nation in an Islamist and authoritarian direction, warmed relations with Russia, the only serious target of NATO, and begun aggressively expanding Turkish influence and control in Syria, Libya, and the eastern Mediterranean. Ankara encouraged the current military round by enhancing Azerbaijani capabilities.

Georgia also shares a border with both combatants but is only a bit player in the ongoing drama. However, it has lobbyists in Washington whose mission is to get Tbilisi into NATO and thus turn Georgia into another US defense dependent. Doing so would create a direct border conflict with Russia, made much more dangerous by the volatility of Georgian politics. The irresponsible and reckless President Mikheil Saakashvili triggered the brief yet disastrous 2008 war with Russia and remains active politically. Tbilisi's dubious role is another reason for the US to avoid deeper involvement in the region's disputatious politics.

The second point is that there is nothing sensible America for do, despite cacophonous demands otherwise. In October Washington Post columnist David Ignatius complained: "The global power vacuum invites mischief. The war between Armenia and Azerbaijan has escalated over 10 days of fighting. Armenian leaders initially hoped that US diplomacy could produce a ceasefire; now they look to Moscow."

Translated, Yerevan wanted Washington to save Armenia from both its original aggression and later intransigence. Like many other governments have desired in other conflicts. But how was the US to restrain Azerbaijan, which was able to recover long-lost territory only by resorting to force? America's regional policy has been a disaster. Washington already demonstrated its impotence in Ankara as Erdogan charted an independent course. The US turned a difficult relationship with Moscow into a mini-Cold War. The Trump administration foolishly declared economic war on Iran, creating regional instability and precluding negotiation.

As for Azerbaijan, military intervention would risk war for no good reason. Economic sanctions would punish Baku, but to what end? So far, the president's constant resort to "maximum pressure" has failed to induce political surrender in Havana, Caracas, Damascus, Pyongyang, or Moscow. Whatever the economic price, Aliyeh could ill afford to retreat and anger an entire population currently celebrating his triumph. Anyway, the issue is not worth another failed American attempt at global social engineering. Which means Washington had nothing to offer but words.

Certainly the US should encourage a peaceful settlement and negotiation, but this is a conflict for which there is no obvious diplomatic answer. It is easy to insist that Baku should not have restarted hostilities, but the Alyev government struck because diplomacy had frozen along with the dispute. And Baku's success dramatically reshaped the balance of power, leaving Armenia in a far worse position than before. Creative mediation might help, but Azerbaijan, on offense, showed no interest in such an effort. Nor has Washington demonstrated the ability to reign in Baku's main backer, Turkey, anywhere else. Washington is filled with magical thinking, the belief that the president merely need whisper his command and the entire world will snap to attention. Alas, America long ago lost that ability, if it ever had it.

Moreover, US officials share some blame: On the presumption that Azerbaijan was committed to a peaceful settlement, Washington provided it with arms and aid to combat terrorism. Unfortunately, weaponry, like money, is fungible. And that mistake cannot be unmade.

An equally mistaken belief in the Trump administration's commitment also might have helped lead Armenia astray. Since taking power in the Velvet Revolution two years ago, Pashinyan sought to move westward. However, in the present crisis neither America nor Europe did anything to assist Yerevan – whose occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh remains illegal under international law. Some US interest groups attempted to turn Armenia into a cause celebre of religious persecution, but the Muslim-Christian clash is incidental to broader geopolitics which little concerned the West.

The horrid genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire against ethnic Armenians a century ago is constantly cited but remains irrelevant to today's conflict. Around three decades ago Armenia invaded Azerbaijan to seize incontestably Azerbaijani land. Baku struck back for reasons of nationalism, not religion. The essential irrelevance of religion is reflected in Christian Russia's good relations with Muslim Azerbaijan, Jewish Israel arming Muslim Azerbaijan, and Muslim Iran's long backing for Christian Armenia, though these ties ebbed in the last couple years. The US should no more be a crusading Christian republic than a crusading republic.

Finally, Russia demonstrated that other powers have an interest in peace and stability and are able to act. That is a tough lesson for the denizens of Washington to learn, given their irrational hatred of Russia. Vladimir Putin is no cuddly liberal but most American policymakers make hypocrisy and sanctimony the foundations of their approach to Moscow. After all, Putin has killed fewer innocent people than Trump administration's favorite dictator, Mohammed bin Salman, whose aggression against Yemen has resulted in more than five years of murder and mayhem and created the worst humanitarian disaster on the planet. Yet Washington continues to sell Saudi Arabia more weapons and munitions with which to kill more Yemeni civilians.

Moreover, though Moscow has behaved badly, in Georgia and Ukraine in particular, so has the US in Russia's eyes. Washington misled Moscow over NATO expansion, dismantled longtime Russian friend Serbia, pushed NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, embraced Tbilisi, which fired on Russian troops guaranteeing security in neighboring secessionist territory, encouraged a street putsch against an elected, Russophile government in Kiev, and sought to push Moscow out of Syria, an ally of nearly 70 years. The expectation of American policymakers that they can use military force to push the Monroe Doctrine up to Russia's border without triggering a sharp response is unrealistic at best, deadly at worst.

Of course, the Russia-brokered accord was a clear diplomatic triumph and likely will solidify Moscow's influence. However, with success has come responsibility, which could prove costly to Moscow. The accord remains fragile and unstable, and might collapse.

By its nature the agreement is short-term and does not address the fundamental issue, the status of N-K. Indeed, on its own terms either party, which would most likely be Azerbaijan in this case, can order the withdrawal of Russian monitors in five years. However, the modus vivendi might not last even that long. Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev posited: "I hope that today's ceasefire and our further plans to normalize relations with Armenia, if perceived positively by the Armenian side, can create a new situation in the region, a situation of cooperation, a situation of strengthening stability and security." With Yerevan aflame after angry mobs took over the National Assembly building, severely beat that body's speaker, trashed the prime minister's home, and forced him into hiding, "positive" probably is not the right word to describe Armenians' perception of the settlement. In fact, those who abandoned their homes in territory turned over to Azerbaijan adopted a scorched earth policy, destroying everything.

Both sides probably view the latest agreement a bit like French Gen. Ferdinand Foch presciently saw the Versailles Treaty: "This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years." Only the N-K time frame might be much shorter. Nevertheless, no one else has offered any better alternative. Unfortunately, zero-sum disputes over territory are among the most difficult disputes to resolve. Either Armenia or Azerbaijan will control N-K. Either ethnic Armenians or Azerbaijanis will live in N-K. Yes, the ideal would be people from both lands to live together in a democratic state, joining hands around a bonfire to sing Kumbaya every night. However, no one believes that is even a remote possibility.

With nothing meaningful to offer to solve the current firefight, it was best for Washington to stay out. In fact, Armenia's old guard, pushed out of power by Pashinyan two years ago in the Velvet Revolution, blame their nation's defeat on his government's subsequent turn West, from which it received little support. Brokering the current defeat would merely have reinforced anger against America.

Russia acted because it has far more at stake. Let it undertake the burden of seeking a settlement. Let it accept the cost of enforcing a settlement. Let it bear the blame if the system again crashes.

US policymakers have trouble imagining a world in which a sparrow falls to earth, to borrow Biblical imagery, without the US responding. If the bird falls in Nagorno-Karabakh, at least, Americans should allow someone else to pick it up. It is not Washington's purpose to make every conflict on earth America's own.

Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire .

[Nov 25, 2020] Dangerous Precedent- Military Force Works (For Some) - Antiwar.com Original

Nov 25, 2020 | original.antiwar.com

Dangerous Precedent: Military Force Works (For Some)

by Maj. Danny Sjursen, USA (ret.) Posted on November 25, 2020

Predictions are tricky matters in world affairs – and as it turns out, prescience produces little in the way of public or personal vindication. There's scant satisfaction when one's subjects tend towards the tragic. Take the (for now) paused 44-day war in the South Caucasus. Back in an October interview , I offered this (then) seemingly provocative prognosis:

"If this thing gets solved, or put back in the freezer, which is about the best we can hope for right now, it will be Putin playing King Solomon and cutting the Nagorno-Karabakh baby in half."

Think Moscow will merit plaudits from mainstream media? After all, four weeks ago, a U.S.-brokered truce held a whole few hours !

Snark aside, intellectual merriment loses luster when it amounts to dancing on thousands of fresh graves filled with family members of the tens of thousands more newly displaced . Only the implications of the ceasefire's terms – under which Armenian troops withdraw from Nagorno-Karabakh after a 26 years occupation and replaced by Russian peacekeepers – are also disturbing. The outcome also set potentially long-lasting precedents.

Make no mistake this was no small victory for the initiator – if not aggressor – nation of Azerbaijan. That under the agreement , Azeri troops stay in place within areas of Nagorno-Karabakh they seized in battle, has profound ramifications. War worked. Furthermore, seven odd weeks of combat proved – once again – that it often does, at least in certain contexts.

What are those (not-so) special situations, you ask? Easy: be in the esteemed and wealthy Western camp. Kow-tow diplomatically and play ball economically – especially in energy sales – with multinational corporations headquartered in North American and European capitals. Thus, win powerful friends and influence prominent people and nearly anything is permissible.

Anyway, both people and leaders in Baku – especially the mini-Stalinist Aliyev dynasty running the family fiefdom – are thrilled with the outcome. Same goes for folks in Ankara, and madcap Erdogan – the man who would be sultan – himself. Instructively, there's no less enthusiasm in Tel Aviv – not just by Bibi Netanyahu's dominant rightist ethnocrats . Because this much you can't make up: pro-Baku rallies and the waving of Azeri flags in Israel!

Look, Ankara hates their Armenian late genocide victims for surviving to tell the Turk-indicting tale. Besides, Erdogan is pursuing neo-Ottoman adventurism region-wide, and more than happy to tap in into ethno-Turkic and co-religionist solidarity to grease those grandiose wheels. Israel's self-styled Jewish and Democratic hybrid state support for Shia Islamic majority Azerbaijan seems stranger – unless one's in the know on the lengthy and sordid ties between Bibi and Baku.

Not so among Armenians in Yerevan – where protesters stormed the parliament, physically accosted the speaker and reportedly looted the prime minister's own office. Something tells me we haven't heard the last of Armenia's army in Nagorno-Karabakh – given the soreness and inherent instability of losing sides in long-standing and externally-escalated ethno-religious conflicts.

And here's the troubling rub: if not quite smoking guns there's plenty of smoke indicating that Turkey – and to a lesser but significant extent, Israel – conspired with Azerbaijan's petty autocrats to conquer (or reconquer) Nagorno-Karabakh. The preparatory collusion was years in the making, ramped up mightily in the months before D-Day – yet unfolded largely under the U.S. and broader international radar. Consider a cursory recitation of the salient sequence.

Ankara's support for its Azeri Turkic-brethren has grown gradually more overt for years. So have its long-standing arms-sales to Baku. Then came a decisive pivot – according to one report , a six-fold jump in weapon's transfers to Azerbaijan over the last year. Then, this past summer, Turkish troops trained and did joint exercises with Azeri forces. Consider it a pre-invasion capstone.

Finally – now here's a cute catalyst – Ankara reportedly moved those implausibly-deniable Syrian mercenaries into Azerbaijan two weeks before Baku's attack. Don't take my radical word for it, though. Consider the conclusions of the decidedly establishment-friendly Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's resident Caucasus expert. Fellow longtime NK-watcher Tom de Waal was as clear as he was concise:

"It's pretty obvious that Azerbaijan has been preparing for this. Azerbaijan decided it wanted to change the status quo and that the Armenian side had no interest in a war " and "Clearly, the decisive factor in this conflict is Turkey's intervention on Azerbaijan's side. They seem to be heavily coordinating the war effort."

All told, that indirect intervention, coordination, and the combat- proven capabilities of allied arms sales bonanzas – especially Turkish Bayraktar TB2 and Israeli kamikaze drones – were decisive. Thousands of Yerevan's troops were killed, about a third of its tanks were destroyed, and at least 50,000 Armenians have fled in the face of Azeri gains.

Then, in the eleventh hour breach – as if to force friendly peace terms from Russia – Turkey threatened to intervene outright. Just how did big, bad, unhinged and the 10-foot-tall Putin of Democrat-delusions respond to Erdogan's provocation? Well, he essentially folded – or settled – in the interest of temporary tranquility in Russia's restive near-abroad. Recall that Moscow eschewed even much menacing – let alone actual intervention – on behalf of its official Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) Armenian ally.

That this was all so represents nothing less than a paradigm-shifting precedent-setter. Or at least a reminder of force's forever utility for some. Boost your batch of backers, gather the tech-savvy arsenal that's thus available, and ready your patron-trained troops for war. Invade only once the green-light comes from on-external-high, and the "rules-based" international order that isn't – but is dominated (for now) by Washington – will avert eyes long enough to enable Nuremberg's " supreme crime " of armed aggression to work its magic.

So force pays if your government has coveted energy resources, the cash they produce, the weapons they buy – plus powerful patrons willing to sell you the cutting edge stuff. Just ask sundry Gulf Arab autocrats! (Though it rarely turns out as well for internal – especially Shia dissidents or, you know, Yemeni kids).

To take it a step further, maybe your benefactor even tosses in some third-party mercenaries, trains and advises your army just before game-time, and threatens outright intervention if your little-bro-government doesn't get it's way. It also helps if your patron's patron is still a hyper-hegemon that bullies – I mean, "leads" by principled example – much of the wealthy world into silence or complicity, and looks the other way long enough for facts on the ground to turn your way. Now there's a formula for force as solution to frozen conflicts!

No doubt other parties paid attention. Heck, they want in on the violent game-changing game! Believe you me, there are plenty of neo-fascists, adventurist American "allies," and frenemies – all in need of a little citizen-distraction from Covid, corruption, and economic collapse – who are all in for applying the new NK-formula. Ukrainian fascists, Georgian Euro-aspirants, frightened and ever-opportunist Baltic bros or Taiwanese troops, Egypt's military coup-artists, Arabian princely theocrats, and no doubt Israel's Bibi bunch – yea, they all took careful Caucasus-notes.

So where does America's president-elect, Joe Biden, stand on the Russian-brokered truce, you ask? About as you'd suspect from a fella inside the beltway cult of "collusion." Biden picked partisan point-scoring over principled consistency. He " slammed " Trump's supposed slow response to the NK-fighting and accused him of "delegating the diplomacy to Moscow." In fact, his campaign's initial statement singled out Moscow's ostensibly "cynical" arms sales to both conflict parties and failed to name even once the war's Beetlejuice of bellicosity – Turkey.

Never known for nuance, the gut-player-elect failed to couch his rather bold critique with admissions of US security assistance to both sides, acknowledge the Tel Aviv and Ankara accelerants, nor the circumscribed options for any administration in an unfrozen conflict in which Washington has no real " dog in the fight ." Well, that's strange – seeing as the Russian-led settlement pushed past achieving one of Biden's publicly stated goals: to "make clear to Armenia that regions surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh cannot be occupied indefinitely."

Well, so it goes with Russia-obsessed Democratic administrations beset with the clinical -narcissism of American exceptionalism. No matter how distant the conflict, no matter how far off the citizenry's obscurity-radar: the maelstrom must be about us . See everything, everywhere , is apparently about US interests, anxieties, and obsessions. Today's obsessive flavor of the moment – and for most of the century since Bolshevik Red October – is Moscow.

Therein lies the problem, and what I've been boy-who-cried-wolfing about regarding the real risk regarding the coming Democratic administration. That is, after making everything about Trump and Russia for four years, they might begin believing their own exaggerated alarmism and follow through with legit escalation and acceleration of theater numero uno of a dual-front, Eurasia-spanning Cold War encore. If Moscow and Beijing are forever branded bad boys – in motive and machinations – then on shall continually churn the war state, with all the pecuniary and professional benefits to both the outgoing Trump team and incoming Biden bunch alike.

Few Americans will notice, or bother to bother themselves about it – pandemic preoccupied and social media distracted as they be – until the fruits of folly flash in front of their eyes (pun intended).

Forget Condi Rice's farcical foreboding of a mushroom cloud as smoking gun . Even the Bushies' bald-faced lies rarely reached past Saddam's singular nuclear blasts – Washington and Moscow might end the world in an afternoon.

So permit me one final prediction: if they do, some staunch US"ally" learned-of the latest Caucasus-conclusions will be the one to drag us down to oblivion.

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army officer, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy (CIP), contributing editor at Antiwar.com , and director of the new Eisenhower Media Network (EMN). His work has appeared in the NY Times, LA Times, The Nation, Huff Post, The Hill, Salon, The American Conservative, Mother Jones, Scheer Post and Tom Dispatch, among other publications. He served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge and Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War . Along with fellow vet Chris "Henri" Henriksen, he co-hosts the podcast " Fortress on a Hill ." Follow him on Twitter @SkepticalVet and on his website for media requests and past publications.

Copyright 2020 Danny Sjursen

[Nov 23, 2020] The Germans Are Back! by C.J. Hopkins

Notable quotes:
"... granting the government the authority to issue whatever edicts it wants under the guise of protecting the public health ..."
"... formally granted the government the authority to issue whatever edicts it wanted under the guise of remedying the distress of the people ..."
"... It functions like a cult , totalitarianism. It creeps up on you, little by little, little lie by little lie, accommodation by accommodation, rationalization by rationalization until one day you find yourself taking orders from some twisted little narcissistic nihilist on a mission to remake the entire world. You don't surrender to it all at once. You do it over the course of weeks and months. Imperceptibly, it becomes your reality. You do not recognize that you are in it, because everything you see is part of it, and everyone you know is in it except for the others , who are not part of it. The "deniers." The "deviants." The "foreigners." The "strangers." The "Covidiots." The "virus spreaders." ..."
Nov 23, 2020 | www.unz.com

Break out the Wagner, folks the Germans are back! No, not the warm, fuzzy, pussified, peace-loving, post-war Germans the Germans ! You know the ones I mean. The "I didn't know where the trains were going" Germans. The "I was just following orders" Germans. The other Germans.

Yeah those Germans.

In case you missed it, on November 18, the German parliament passed a law, the so-called "Infection Protection Act" ("Das Infektionsschutzgesetz" in German) formally granting the government the authority to issue whatever edicts it wants under the guise of protecting the public health . The government has been doing this anyway -- ordering lockdowns, curfews, travel bans, banning demonstrations, raiding homes and businesses, ordering everyone to wear medical masks, harassing and arresting dissidents, etc. -- but now it has been "legitimized" by the Bundestag, enshrined into law, and presumably stamped with one of those intricate official stamps that German bureaucrats like to stamp things with.

Now, this "Infection Protection Act," which was rushed through the parliament, is not in any way comparable to the " Enabling Act of 1933 ," which formally granted the government the authority to issue whatever edicts it wanted under the guise of remedying the distress of the people . Yes, I realize that sounds quite similar, but, according to the government and the German media, there is no absolutely equivalence whatsoever, and anyone who suggests there is is "a far-right AfD extremist," "a neo-Nazi conspiracy theorist," or "an anti-vax esotericist," or whatever.

As the Protection Act was being legitimized (i.e., the current one, not the one in 1933), tens of thousands of anti-totalitarian protesters gathered in the streets, many of them carrying copies of the Grundgesetz (i.e., the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany), which the parliament had just abrogated. They were met by thousands of riot police, who declared the demonstration "illegal" (because many of the protesters were not wearing masks), beat up and arrested hundreds of them , and then hosed down the rest with water cannons .

The German media -- which are totally objective, and not at all like Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda in the Nazi era -- dutifully reminded the German public that these protesters were all "Corona Deniers," "far-right extremists," "conspiracy theorists," "anti-vaxxers," "neo-Nazis," and so on, so they probably got what they deserved. Also, a spokesperson for the Berlin police (who bear absolutely no resemblance to the Gestapo, or the Stasi, or any other notorious official-ideology-enforcing goons) pointed out that their water cannons were only being used to "irrigate" the protesters (i.e., not being aimed directly at them) because there were so many "Corona Denier" children in their ranks.

According to the government, the German media, the intelligentsia, and, basically, anyone in public life who wants to remain there, these "Corona Deniers" are becoming a problem. They are spreading baseless "conspiracy theories" that are threatening the public health and causing distress to the German people (e.g., that the vast majority of those infected suffer only mild to moderate flu symptoms or, more commonly, no symptoms at all, and that over 99.7% survive ). They are walking around without medical-looking masks, which is making a mockery of the government and media's efforts to convince the public that they are under attack by an apocalyptic plague. They are posting scientific facts on the Internet. They are staging these protests and otherwise challenging the government's right to declare a "health emergency," suspend the German constitution indefinitely, and rule society by decree and force.

Despite the German government and media's efforts to demonize anyone not obediently parroting the official "New Normal" narrative as a "dangerous neo-Nazi Corona Denier," the "Corona Denialism" movement is growing, not just in Germany, but all throughout Europe . Clearly, the time is coming for Germany to take stronger measures against this threat. The health of the Vater uh, the nation, is at stake! Fortunately, this "Infection Protection Act" will provide the government with the authority it needs to conceive and carry out some kind of well, you know, solution. Allowing these degenerate anti-social deviants to run around challenging the German government's absolute power is not an option, not in a time of national health emergency! These " Nazi-sympathizing Corona Deniers " must be rooted out and dealt with, mercilessly!

I'm not privy to the details, of course, but, it being Germany, I imagine some sort of Special Task Force has been set up to efficiently deal with the "Corona Denier Problem." Steps are clearly already being taken. Alternative media outlets are being deplatformed (because, according the media, they are "Querfront magazines" ). In April, a well-known dissident lawyer was forcibly committed to a psychiatric ward (but the authorities and the media assured us that it had nothing to do with her dissident views, or with the lawsuits she was filing against the government ; she just coincidentally became completely paranoid). Heavily-armed police are arresting YouTubers (although it isn't clear exactly what for, as the authorities have released no details and the mainstream media is not reporting it).

In the run-up to the 29 August demonstration, at which the government granted some neo-Nazis de-facto permission to "storm the Reichstag," so that the media could film it and discredit the real protest , one German politician went so far as to call for "Corona Deniers" to be deported presumably on trains, somewhere to the east.

But seriously, I don't mean to pick on the Germans. I love the Germans. I live in Germany. And they're hardly the only ones implementing the new pathologized totalitarianism . It's just that, given their not-too-distant history, it is rather depressing, and more than a little frightening, to watch as Germany is once again transformed into a totalitarian state, where the police are hunting down the mask-less on the streets, raiding restaurants, bars, and people's homes, where goose-stepping little Good German citizens are peering into the windows of Yoga studios to see if they are violating "social distancing rules," where I can't take a walk or shop for groceries without being surrounded by hostile, glaring, sometimes verbally-abusive Germans, who are infuriated that I'm not wearing a mask, and otherwise mindlessly following orders, and who robotically remind me, "Es ist Pflicht! Es ist Pflicht!"

Yes, I am fully aware that it is "Pflicht." If I had any doubt as to whether it was "Pflicht," the Berlin Senat cleared that up when they commissioned and ran this charming advert instructing me to fuck myself if I don't want to follow their "Corona orders" and profess my belief in their new Big Lie.

And OK, before the Literalist Society starts flooding me with outraged emails, no, I'm not calling these Germans "Nazis." I am calling them "totalitarians." Which, at this point, given everything we know, if you're still pretending that this coronavirus in any way warrants the increasingly ridiculous "emergency measures" we are being subjected to, I'm sorry, but that is what you are.

You may not believe that is what you are totalitarians never do, not until it is far too late.

It functions like a cult , totalitarianism. It creeps up on you, little by little, little lie by little lie, accommodation by accommodation, rationalization by rationalization until one day you find yourself taking orders from some twisted little narcissistic nihilist on a mission to remake the entire world. You don't surrender to it all at once. You do it over the course of weeks and months. Imperceptibly, it becomes your reality. You do not recognize that you are in it, because everything you see is part of it, and everyone you know is in it except for the others , who are not part of it. The "deniers." The "deviants." The "foreigners." The "strangers." The "Covidiots." The "virus spreaders."

See, although the narratives and symbols may change, totalitarianism is totalitarianism. It doesn't really matter which uniform it wears, or which language it speaks it is the same abomination. It is an idol, a simulacrum of the hubris of man, formed from the clay of the minds of the masses by megalomaniacal spiritual cripples who want to exterminate what they cannot control. And what they want to control is always everything. Everything that reminds them of their weakness and their shame. You. Me. Society. The world. Laughter. Love. Honor. Faith. The past. The future. Life. Death. Everything that will not obey them.

Unfortunately, once this kind of thing gets started, and reaches the stage we are currently experiencing, more often than not, it does not stop, not until cities lie in ruins or fields are littered with human skulls. It might us take ten or twelve years to get there, but, make no mistake, that's where we're headed, where totalitarianism is always headed if you don't believe me, just ask the Germans.

C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volumes I and II of his Consent Factory Essays are published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .

[Nov 18, 2020] Governments are "tools" to accomplish things and in centran situation totalitarian goverments are better tools

Nov 18, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Stephen Laudig , Nov 18 2020 20:03 utc | 8

Governments are "tools" to accomplish things. The totalitarian Han Communist Party runs the PRC in a way that the Democratic/Republican Party does not run the United States. Totalitarians recognize no inherent limit on their 'authority' to act. Non-totalitarians do. A totalitarian government is a better 'tool' to command lock step obedience to a central authority because most of the population at large and ALL of the political population knows what happens should the central command total authority be disobeyed or be seen to be disobeyed.

So in a plague, war maybe, flooding, famine, fires, the totalitarians will be more effective.

So what? In ordinary times I'd rather live under non-totalitarians because incarceration for thought crime is vastly less frequent.

Totalitarianism is a 'good tool' for exceptional matters requiring "uniform and disciplined" response. Under normal times its just another Third Reich.

Ask any Han who wishes to state a non-approved opinion; any Tibetan wishing to display a photo of the Dalai Lama and any Muslim wishing to be orthodox. Why is it that you don't see people illegally entering totalitarian Han Communist China? well except from an even worse place North Korea. While millions want to "be" in the US? People vote with their feet. They flee from the Totalitarians. They flee toward the US. Power to people feet.

psychohistorian , Nov 18 2020 20:53 utc | 19

@ Stephen Laudig | Nov 18 2020 20:03 utc | 8 who wrote about totalitarian

Totalitarian is the definition of the effect of global private finance on the West, is it not?

Totalitarian describes the social contract in the West much more than in China.

[Nov 18, 2020] Ike's a mystery. Why did he NOT question Harry Truman's action as for CIA and NATO? He actrually facilites the rise of military-insdutrial complex (especially CIA -- he appointed Allen Dulles) and then complained about it

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... His farewell address was just flapdoodle; it wasn't really dredged up till the 70s. Eisenhower spent eight years spreading tripwires and mines and then said "Watch out." Thanks buddy. ..."
Nov 18, 2020 | www.unz.com

Franz , says: November 12, 2020 at 10:54 pm GMT • 21.0 hours ago

@endthefed

Eisenhower is always lauded for his MIC warning. Frankly he ticks me off. Thanks for the warning AFTER you were in some position to mitigate.

Ike's a mystery. Why did he NOT question Harry Truman's commitments to NATO, the UN, and all that rubbish? Ike was a WWII guy. He knew Americans hated the UN in 1953 as much as they hated the League of Nations after WWI. But he let it all slide and get bigger.

His farewell address was just flapdoodle; it wasn't really dredged up till the 70s. Eisenhower spent eight years spreading tripwires and mines and then said "Watch out." Thanks buddy.

endthefed , says: November 12, 2020 at 11:08 pm GMT • 20.7 hours ago
@Bragadocious

Well, agree on your points however, on the other side of the ledger, he never understood the stupidity of the Korean war (that he could have ended) and majorly up-ramped CIA activities in all manner of regime change (bay of pigs anyone?). Almost a direct path to our foreign policy now (and now domestic policy)

[Nov 18, 2020] Jewish financial oligarchy and the rise of NSDAP in Germany

Nov 18, 2020 | www.unz.com

karel , says: November 16, 2020 at 2:38 am GMT • 2.6 days ago

Yes indeed '

'One may wonder: where was the German Left when Hitler's popularity increased amongst Germany's Working class at a speed that puts Covid-19 to shame?

" The left was very much around and the combined electorate of communists and social democrats exceeded in November 1932 that of the NSDAP. I cannot think of a single plausible explanation for the rise in popularity of NSDA. As always and more probably, there was a multitude of reasons, not easily identified then and now. My guess is that during the economic collapse of Germany the citizens have lost patience with the left wing parties as the communist and socialists did little, or perhaps could do little, to alleviate their hardship. Then there was a novelty feature of the NSDAP and the belief or a hope that nationalism could reduce the foreign interference in the affairs of Germany. Furthermore, the legend of the "Dolchstoss" was steadily gaining in popularity with the increasingly distant armistice of 1918. Feelings that "we were cheated" and dreams that Germany could be great again were also on the rise. Finally, die NSDAP propaganda apparatus was much better at identifying the "enemies" of the working classes and unemployed by pointing out the factual dominance of the Jews in running the state.

Wielgus , says: November 16, 2020 at 6:47 am GMT • 2.4 days ago
@karel hing. Basically, conservatives like von Papen thought the weakening of the Nazis and their inexperience meant that they could be manipulated.
"The factual dominance of the Jews running the state" – they didn't. They had no significant footing in the armed forces or the civil service in Germany. The Nazis called Weimar the Judenrepublik but had it actually been so, they would have encountered more resistance and less cooperation from state elements than they did. In reality, this was a state that in the 1920s thought about deporting Hitler back to Austria (he did not gain actual German citizenship until relatively late) but never did.
karel , says: November 16, 2020 at 1:56 pm GMT • 2.1 days ago
@Wielgus cillations in support of one or another party are quite common in any system.

The perception that the Jews were running the state was overwhelming, whether you like it or not. Most banks were in Jewish hands as well as large sections of the retail and textile industry. Apparently, almost 80% of all lawyers were Jews. In fact, prior to the putsch in 1933, most Jews could be described as German nationalists. It is paradox that Jews in Czechoslovakia were also leaning towards German nationalism. Czech speaking Jews were more like rare exotic birds. The putsch in 1933 brought them to their senses and those who did not emigrate started to learn Czech.

SolontoCroesus , says: November 16, 2020 at 7:58 pm GMT • 1.8 days ago
@Wielgus Jewish intellectual, Kurt Eisner, and after his assassination, two other Jewish leaders, Gustav Landauer and Eugen Levine, assumed positions of major influence in the "Raterepublik" ("Soviet" Republic"). Rosa Luxemburg, who was also assassinated, was a leader of the revolutionary Spartakus- bund, which was one of the predecessors of the German Communist party.
In the following years as well, Jews held major political posts, primarily in the leadership of the democratic and socialist parties. The most prominent Jewish Political figure was Walther Rathenau, who served first as minister for economic affairs and then as foreign minister.
neutral , says: November 18, 2020 at 7:55 am GMT • 8.3 hours ago
@Wielgus "The factual dominance of the Jews running the state" – they didn't. They had no significant footing in the armed forces or the civil service in Germany.

This is no different to current ZOG regimes now. Just because they are not the rank and file in the military or the government paper pusher does not mean they are not in charge. What they were in charge of was the cultural, financial and academic institutions, when you run these things then you run everything. Luckily for Germany the military was not overrun by the cuckservative types like in the US military is now, there were enough decent types that overthrew the jew in their government.

[Nov 17, 2020] Decapitations at DOD: A Purge, a Coup' or Something Else

Nov 17, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Exactly a week after Esper was unceremoniously dismissed, the Pentagon issued a notice to commanders to prepare to reduce the number of troops in Afghanistan to 2,500, and to reduce the number of troops in Iraq to 2,500 by January 15.

Despite the dark rumors, Esper and his associates weren't fired because they failed to assist Trump in a domestic military takeover, or because they were insufficiently loyal and didn't grovel enough before the person of Donald Trump. The real reason for their dismissal is simple: Esper didn't think U.S. troops should be removed from Afghanistan by Christmas. Trump disagreed.

The commander in chief has "the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views" are aligned with his own, as former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said. This hardly represents a coup.


disgustoo 22 minutes ago

"The commander in chief has "the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views" are aligned with his own, as former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said. This hardly represents a coup."

It's a "coup", alright. A coup against the deep state. Long overdue, but better late than never. President Trump giving The Swamp the middle finger one last time. And flushing out warmonger Biden, daring him to show his true colors & re-escalate again. Checkmate.

M Orban disgustoo 15 minutes ago

Then why did he hire these people the first place?
Now there is only two months left out of 48?

Thuto November 16, 2020 at 6:18 am

It used to be that "it took a village to raise a child", and where I'm from at least this was meant in a very literal sense: it took not only parents but other elders in the community to impart the accumulated wisdom that instills pro-social, community-building values into children, ensuring that it wasn't the sins, but rather the virtues of the elders that were visited upon the children, even unto the seventh generation. The "village" has now largely replaced parents and community elders with a dizzying, eclectic mix of social media influencers, tv personalities, pseudo-thought leaders and an education system that's been captured by our elites to instill their own preferred version of values into our children.

The analogue with the "horizon of understanding" is that for most individuals, defining what it represents has been outsourced to a dizzying mix of experts who are tasked with creating and maintaining a national value system. In a world paralyzed by partisanship, each side of the ideological divide has its own (bought and paid for) triangulated opinion of experts to shape what people on each side come to believe is real. As the chances of creating a harmonious, pro-social horizon of understanding are sacrificed at the altar of partisanship and polarization, the disorientation and discomfort felt by most people as we navigate the unfolding crises of our times is only going to increase.

Reply ↓ >
PlutoniumKun November 16, 2020 at 7:33 am

Thanks, you express this very eloquently.

It seems these days that we are simultaneously bombarded with information and opinions, while also being herded into our ideological corners by unseen algorithms. I honestly don't know what the long term consequences of this will be, but its hard to see good outcomes.

Reply ↓ >
Thuto November 16, 2020 at 8:54 am

Going forward, I suspect the unseen algorithms are going to be the most malign influence in widening the divide, a sort of social herding at scale. On the subject of opinions, most people, for better or worse, still defer to the opinions of experts on important matters, so you can imagine what happens when expert opinion is drawn not from "mere" PMC hired guns but from the upper, upper crust of the oligarchy, even the most independent thinkers are bound to subject their deeply held perceptions/beliefs to a review, if for nothing else but to get in early on a nascent bull market and profit from it.

To take an example, the early adopter set for bitcoin was for a long time made up of hackers, criminals and other fringe players who dabbled out of curiosity. The professional money management industry on the other hand took a dim view of the whole crypto thing, disparaging it at every opportunity and making sure portfolio allocations to it were extremely scarce at the best of times to non-existent every other time. Then came covid, and along with that activist central banks printing unprecedented amounts of money to shore up collapsing economies. With fiat currencies being devalued as a result, the previously skeptical titans of fund management started talking up bitcoin as a store of value comparable to gold, first Paul Tudor Jones, then Stan Druckenmiller, followed most recently by Bill Miller. Granted there are still holdouts like Ray Dalio and Peter Schiff who haven't hopped on to the bitcoin bandwagon but, along with the guys at Microstrategy also becoming fervent evangelists, I suspect the pronouncements of these titans alone are enough to take bitcoin mainstream as an asset class, volatility be damned. I'm not a crypto bull by any stretch but the power of expert opinion raining down from the very top of the class hierarchy to move the herd further down will remain undiminished for a while still, and if said opinion is programmed into an algorithm, heaven help us all.

Reply ↓ >
Eustachedesaintpierre November 16, 2020 at 9:43 am

+1

Reminds me of the old proverb " If it ain't broke don't fix it " while I believe that at some point in time someone decided to come up with a money making child rearing manual which started a flood of variations on that theme resulting in constant tinkering, which in my job would be the equivalent of overworking clay.

Only part of the story of course. /section >

hunkerdown November 16, 2020 at 10:29 am

Consider the structure of the term "common sense", which is just shared opinion. If there is no common sense, there will be no common action.

The problem with coming together is that the ruling class divides and rules us as a normal procedure of creating a class system. Nobody in the ruling class has a problem with this. Their purpose in life is to reproduce the system of mass slavery and adapt it to present conditions and they, being among the elect, are fine with this.

/section >

>

The Rev Kev November 16, 2020 at 9:26 am

Glenn Greenwald
@ggreenwald
'This is endlessly amazing: Brazil, a huge country, has nationwide municipal elections today. Voting is mandatory. *All* votes will be counted & released by tonight.'

Ah, I see the problem here. The difference is that Brazil is a Third World nation that is kept that way by morons such as Bolsanaro. America, on the other hand, is being turned into a Third World nation because the elite is seeing a profit in doing so.

>

[Nov 13, 2020] Neocons Poised to Join New Government by Phil Geraldi

Notable quotes:
"... It would not be overstating the case to suggest that the neoconservative movement has now been born again, though the enemy is now the unreliable Trumpean-dominated Republican Party rather than Saddam Hussein or Ayatollah Khomeini. ..."
"... The transition has also been aided by a more aggressive shift among the Democrats themselves, with Russiagate and other “foreign interference” being blamed for the party’s failure in 2016. ..."
"... The unifying principle that ties many of the mostly Jewish neocons together is, of course, unconditional defense of Israel and everything it does, which leads them to support a policy of American global military dominance which they presume will inter alia serve as a security umbrella for the Jewish state. ..."
"... That change has now occurred and the surge of neocons to take up senior positions in the defense, intelligence and foreign policy agencies will soon take place. In my notes on the neocon revival, I have dubbed the brave new world that the neocons hope to create in Washington as the “Kaganate of Nulandia” after two of the more prominent neocon aspirants, Robert Kagan and Victoria Nuland. ..."
"... A Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton protégé, Nuland openly sought regime change for Ukraine by brazenly supporting government opponents in spite of the fact that Washington and Kiev had ostensibly friendly relations. Her efforts were backed by a $5 billion budget, but she is perhaps most famous for her foul language when referring to the potential European role in managing the unrest that she and the National Endowment for Democracy had helped create. The replacement of the government in Kiev was only the prelude to a sharp break and escalating conflict with Moscow over Russia’s attempts to protect its own interests in Ukraine, most particularly in Crimea. ..."
"... A lot of the neocons are Russian Jews who grew up in households that were Bolshevik communists. They're idea of spreading democracy goes back to Trotsky who tried to spread communism through the Soviet Union. Their hatred toward Russia dates back to their ancestors feudal days under the Tsars and the pogroms they suffered and the ice pick Trotsky got to the head. ..."
"... Obama's deep state lied, people died: https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2020/11/outgoing-syria-envoy-admits-hiding-us-troop-numbers-praises-trumps-mideast-record/170012/ ..."
"... I've never quite figured out the "neocon" ideology, beyond the fact that neocons seem devoted to the sort of status quo present in Washington, D.C. during the three administrations prior to Trump. Military adventurism, nation-building, and interventionist foreign policy, all based on nebulous concepts which are applied unevenly around the world. ..."
"... The Neocon movement seems to have morphed into nothing more than a club for bullies trying to one up each other. ..."
"... "It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way." ..."
"... Neocons don't really prefer war, so much as they prefer overseas "engagements" that may look like war and smell like war. All that's missing in neocon military operations is a defined end state. ..."
Nov 13, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Donald Trump was much troubled during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns by so-called conservatives who rallied behind the #NeverTrump banner, presumably in opposition to his stated intention to end or at least diminish America’s role in wars in the Middle East and Asia. Those individuals are generally described as neoconservatives but the label is itself somewhat misleading and they might more properly be described as liberal warmongers as they are closer to the Democrats than the Republicans on most social issues and are now warming up even more as the new Joe Biden Administration prepares to take office.

To be sure, some neocons stuck with the Republicans, to include the highly controversial Elliott Abrams, who initially opposed Trump but is now the point man for dealing with both Venezuela and Iran. Abrams’ conversion reportedly took place when he realized that the new president genuinely embraced unrelenting hostility towards Iran as exemplified by the ending of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. John Bolton was also a neocon in the White House fold, though he is now a frenemy having been fired by the president and written a book.

Even though the NeverTrumper neocons did not succeed in blocking Donald Trump in 2016, they have been maintaining relevancy by slowly drifting back towards the Democratic Party, which is where they originated back in the 1970s in the office of the Senator from Boeing Henry “Scoop” Jackson. A number of them started their political careers there, to include leading neocon Richard Perle.

It would not be overstating the case to suggest that the neoconservative movement has now been born again, though the enemy is now the unreliable Trumpean-dominated Republican Party rather than Saddam Hussein or Ayatollah Khomeini.

The transition has also been aided by a more aggressive shift among the Democrats themselves, with Russiagate and other “foreign interference” being blamed for the party’s failure in 2016. Given that mutual intense hostility to Trump, the doors to previously shunned liberal media outlets have now opened wide to the stream of foreign policy “experts” who want to “restore a sense of the heroic” to U.S. national security policy. Eliot A. Cohen and David Frum are favored contributors to the Atlantic while Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss were together at the New York Times prior to Weiss’s recent resignation.

Jennifer Rubin, who wrote in 2016 that “It is time for some moral straight talk: Trump is evil incarnate,” is a frequent columnist for The Washington Post while both she and William Kristol appear regularly on MSNBC.

The unifying principle that ties many of the mostly Jewish neocons together is, of course, unconditional defense of Israel and everything it does, which leads them to support a policy of American global military dominance which they presume will inter alia serve as a security umbrella for the Jewish state. In the post-9/11 world, the neocon media’s leading publication The Weekly Standard virtually invented the concept of “Islamofascism” to justify endless war in the Middle East, a development that has killed millions of Muslims, destroyed at least three nations, and cost the U.S. taxpayer more than $5 trillion. The Israel connection has also resulted in neocon support for an aggressive policy against Russia due to its involvement in Syria and has led to repeated calls for the U.S. to attack Iran and destroy Hezbollah in Lebanon. In Eastern Europe, neocon ideologues have aggressively sought “democracy promotion,” which, not coincidentally, has also been a major Democratic Party foreign policy objective.

The neocons are involved in a number of foundations, the most prominent of which is the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), that are funded by Jewish billionaires. FDD is headed by Canadian Mark Dubowitz and it is reported that the group takes direction coming from officials in the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Other major neocon incubators are the American Enterprise Institute, which currently is the home of Paul Wolfowitz, and the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at John Hopkins University. The neocon opposition has been sniping against Trump over the past four years but has been biding its time and building new alliances, waiting for what it has perceived to be an inevitable regime change in Washington.

That change has now occurred and the surge of neocons to take up senior positions in the defense, intelligence and foreign policy agencies will soon take place. In my notes on the neocon revival, I have dubbed the brave new world that the neocons hope to create in Washington as the “Kaganate of Nulandia” after two of the more prominent neocon aspirants, Robert Kagan and Victoria Nuland.

Robert was one of the first neocons to get on the NeverTrump band wagon back in 2016 when he endorsed Hillary Clinton for president and spoke at a Washington fundraiser for her, complaining about the “isolationist” tendency in the Republican Party exemplified by Trump. His wife Victoria Nuland is perhaps better known. She was the driving force behind efforts to destabilize the Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych, an admittedly corrupt autocrat, nevertheless became Prime Minister after a free election. Nuland, who was the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department, provided open support to the Maidan Square demonstrators opposed to Yanukovych’s government, to include media friendly appearances passing out cookies on the square to encourage the protesters.

A Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton protégé, Nuland openly sought regime change for Ukraine by brazenly supporting government opponents in spite of the fact that Washington and Kiev had ostensibly friendly relations. Her efforts were backed by a $5 billion budget, but she is perhaps most famous for her foul language when referring to the potential European role in managing the unrest that she and the National Endowment for Democracy had helped create. The replacement of the government in Kiev was only the prelude to a sharp break and escalating conflict with Moscow over Russia’s attempts to protect its own interests in Ukraine, most particularly in Crimea.

And, to be sure, beyond regime change in places like Ukraine, President Barack Obama was no slouch when it came to starting actual shooting wars in places like Libya and Syria while also killing people, including American citizens, using drones. Biden appears poised to inherit many former Obama White House senior officials, who would consider the eager-to-please neoconservatives a comfortable fit as fellow foot soldiers in the new administration. Foreign policy hawks expected to have senior positions in the Biden Administration include Antony Blinken, Nicholas Burns, Susan Rice, Valerie Jarrett, Samantha Power and, most important of all the hawkish Michele Flournoy, who has been cited as a possible secretary of defense. And don’t count Hillary Clinton out. Biden is reportedly getting his briefings on the Middle East from Dan Shapiro, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, who now lives in the Jewish state and is reportedly working for an Israeli government supported think tank, the Institute for National Security Studies.

Nowhere in Biden’s possible foreign policy circle does one find anyone who is resistant to the idea of worldwide interventionism in support of claimed humanitarian objectives, even if it would lead to a new cold war with major competitor powers like Russia and China. In fact, Biden himself appears to embrace an extremely bellicose view on a proper relationship with both Moscow and Beijing “claiming that he is defending democracy against its enemies.” His language is unrelenting, so much so that it is Donald Trump who could plausibly be described as the peace candidate in the recently completed election, having said at the Republican National Convention in August “Joe Biden spent his entire career outsourcing their dreams and the dreams of American workers, offshoring their jobs, opening their borders and sending their sons and daughters to fight in endless foreign wars, wars that never ended.”

Polish Janitor , 13 November 2020 at 11:34 AM

It should be noted that the return of "neocons" does not mean the return of people like Wolfowitz, Ladeen, Feith, Kristol who are more "straussian" than "liberal/internationalist", but those like Nuland, Rice, Sam Powell, Petraeus, Flournoy, heck even Hilary Clinton as UN Ambassador who are CFR-type liberal interventionist than pure military hawks such as Bolton or Mike Flynn.

These liberal internationalists, as opposed to straussian neocons, will intervene in collaboration with EU/NATO/QUAD (i.e. multilaterally) in the name upholding human rights and toppling authoritarianism, rather than for oil, WMDs, or similar concrete objectives. In very simple terms, the new Biden administration's foreign policy will be none other than the return to "endless wars" for nation-building purposes first and last.

fakebot , 13 November 2020 at 11:43 AM

The name Kagan is the Russianized version of the name Cohen. He was going to be McCain's NSA had he been elected. They pulled a stunt with the Bush admin to make Obama look weak by pushing Georgia into war with Russia in 2008. Sakaasvili, the president of Georgia, was literally eating his own tie:

https://cdn1.img.sputniknews.com/img/102445/69/1024456927_0:98:1000:639_1000x541_80_0_0_d2bb118481dc653ec7d2a8b170b8f6bf.jpg

A lot of the neocons are Russian Jews who grew up in households that were Bolshevik communists. They're idea of spreading democracy goes back to Trotsky who tried to spread communism through the Soviet Union. Their hatred toward Russia dates back to their ancestors feudal days under the Tsars and the pogroms they suffered and the ice pick Trotsky got to the head.

I don't think they have that much influence. They pushed a lot of nonsense in the late 70/early 80s about how the Taliban were George Washingtons and here we are today, they're worst than the Comanche. The last time I saw Richard Perle make a TV appearance, he was crying like a baby. Robert Novak, the prince of darkness, was a Ron Paul supporter. The only ones really kicking around are Bill Kristol and Jennifer Rubin, but Kristol was almost alone when he was talking about putting 50,000 boots on the ground in Syria. Rubin is a harpie who only got crazier and crazier. Kagan had his foot in the door with Hillary only because of his wife. Those two might get back in with Biden on Ukraine, but Biden would do well to keep them at a distance.

Mark K Logan , 13 November 2020 at 11:57 AM

Thanks.

The lone bright spot is Biden's stated intention of restoring the JCPOA. And, I guess, the pending defenestration of Pompeo The Great.

I suspect the condition of the US economy and the massive deficits will assist in discouraging rash actions elsewhere. Have to wait and see.

Fred , 13 November 2020 at 12:36 PM

Obama's deep state lied, people died: https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2020/11/outgoing-syria-envoy-admits-hiding-us-troop-numbers-praises-trumps-mideast-record/170012/

It's great when career professionals sabotage the elected president's foreign policy.

JM Gavin , 13 November 2020 at 01:00 PM

I've never quite figured out the "neocon" ideology, beyond the fact that neocons seem devoted to the sort of status quo present in Washington, D.C. during the three administrations prior to Trump. Military adventurism, nation-building, and interventionist foreign policy, all based on nebulous concepts which are applied unevenly around the world.

It seems now that there is a new breed of neocons, unified by opposition to Trump's messaging, but not much else. Odd to find people like Samantha Power, John Bolton, Jim Mattis, and Paul Wolfowitz marching together in perfect step.

The Beaver , 13 November 2020 at 02:49 PM

Mr Geraldi

A good perspective by Philip Weiss on the same subject. Eliot A Cohen must be communicating a lot with the Kagan brothers , Dennis Ross and Perle to see who can be parachuted either to the WH or Foggy Bottom.

https://mondoweiss.net/2020/10/neoconservatives-are-flocking-to-biden-and-lets-forget-about-the-iran-deal/

BrianC , 13 November 2020 at 03:08 PM

@JM Gavin

I've never quite figured out the "neocon" ideology

The revolutionary spirit (see E. Michael Jones' work). From communism to neoconservatism it's ultimately an attack on the Beatitudes and Christ's Sermon on the Mount. "The works of mercy are the opposite of the works of war" -- Servant of God Dorothy Day

Mark K Logan , 13 November 2020 at 03:23 PM

JM Gavin,

Sir,

I hold the Cold Warriors like Scoop a species distinct from those of the post-USSR era. The current version started at the end of the cold war. We felt like kings of the world after Gulf War 1 and the shoe seemed to fit.

The HW Bush administration pondered how best to use this power for good. I've read some things which report there was a debate within the administration on whether to clean up Yugoslavia or Somalia first. They got Ron to "do the honors" for the invasion of Somalia at Oxford: About 20 minutes in. https://www.c-span.org/video/?35586-1/arising-ashes-world-order

That was played as part of the pep-talk on the Juneau off the coast of Somalia. Stirring stuff.

In some small way I never stopped sipping that Kool Aid. It's hard to stand by and watch unspeakable evil go down when you have the power to stop it...or think you do. Time will tell if the Neocons are capable of perceiving the limits of force. Certainly had some hard lessons in the last few decades.

EEngineer , 13 November 2020 at 03:57 PM

@JM Gavin

Hogs lining up for a spot at the trough? The Neocon movement seems to have morphed into nothing more than a club for bullies trying to one up each other.

Dan , 13 November 2020 at 04:35 PM

I think its generally shocking that Trump or the republicans didn't make a bigger issue of Biden's history of supporting disastrous intervention, especially his Iraq War vote. Maybe they felt like its not a winning issue, that they would lose as many votes as they gain by appearing more isolationist. But overall, Trump favoring diplomacy over cruise missiles should have been a bigger point in his favor in the election.

jerseycityjoan , 13 November 2020 at 04:52 PM

It is distressing to read that we will have people in the government who are looking for a fight. That is especially true in view of China's aggression in recent years and the responses we will have to make to that. I think we will have more than enough to do to handle China. What do the neocons want to do about China?

Here is an article about China that really startled me and made me realize how much of a threat is was becoming. The Air Force chief of staff talks about the challenges of countries trying to compete militarily with us in ways that have not occurred for awhile. Here are two quotes that really got me:

"Tomorrow's Airmen are more likely to fight in highly contested environments, and must be prepared to fight through combat attrition rates and risks to the nation that are more akin to the World War II era than the uncontested environments to which we have since become accustomed," Brown writes."

And

"Wargames and modeling have repeatedly shown that if the Air Force fails to adapt, there will be mission failure, Brown warns. Rules-based international order may "disintegrate and our national interests will be significantly challenged," according to the memo."

https://www.airforcemag.com/brown-air-force-must-speed-up-change-or-face-harsh-consequences/#.X02DjeMiZQM.mailto

The article doesn't say we will have another arms race but that is an obvious response to China's competition with us. I thought all that was done and gone. I do not want to resume it. I don't want another period of foreign entanglements, period. We still haven't paid for the War Against Terrorism. I look into the future and all I see is us racking up bills that we have no ability to pay. And then there is the human cost of all this, I don't want to even think about that.

turcopolier , 13 November 2020 at 05:40 PM

jerseycityjoan

"I thought all that was done and gone. I do not want to resume it." Childish. "Only the dead have seen the end of war."

JM Gavin , 13 November 2020 at 05:54 PM

EEngineer,

Snouts in the trough accounts for a certain amount of neocons, I'm sure. There is, however, a unifying vision beyond that which puzzles me, given the very different political orientations of various neocons. Neocons are found in academia and the media as well. Those types are less dependent on taxpayer dollars in exchange for their views (they'll get whatever tax money gets pushed their way in grants, etc regardless).

I find Polish Janitor's "straussian" and "liberal/internationalist" flavors of neocon intriguing, as I hadn't considered that before.

JMG

JM Gavin , 13 November 2020 at 05:59 PM

COL Lang's quote from Plato reminds me of another (from Cormac McCarthy): "It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way."

Neocons don't really prefer war, so much as they prefer overseas "engagements" that may look like war and smell like war. All that's missing in neocon military operations is a defined end state.

JMG

JM Gavin , 13 November 2020 at 06:10 PM

Mark K. Logan,

I concur with your thoughts about standing by as evil occurs. We just have a habit of jumping into complex situations we don't understand, and making things worse. I suspect you feel the same way.

The military misadventures during my career (Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria) were marked by our own black and white thinking. The more successful adventures (Colombia, Nepal) were marked by our appreciation (to a certain extent) of the complex nature of the environments we were getting involved in...and the fact that we weren't involved in nation-building in the latter two locales. There were viable governments in place, and we weren't trying to replace them.

JMG

Deap , 13 November 2020 at 06:53 PM

Here is another Biden clip that should have been exploited too - way back when - when the media was a little more trusted, but no less pompous. However, Biden The Plagerizer had it coming.

Now tell me America is not the Land of Opportunity, when one can continuously shoot themselves in the foot and then rise from the dead yet again, and again: https://rumble.com/vb3c09-resurfaced-video-of-joe-biden-should-destroy-him.html?mref=23gga&mrefc=2

Though I am warming more and more to Trump Media becoming the real soul of America. Plus someone, in time. will need to pick up Rush Limbaugh's empire. America needs a counter-weight to fake news more than it needs the keys to the White House, with all its entangling webs, palace intrigues, chains and pitfalls.

Godspeed President Trump. If someone with as few talents s Biden can rise like Lazarus, just think what you can do with your little finger. No wonder the Democrats want Trump destroyed; not just defeated in a re-election. We have your back, Mr President.

TV , 13 November 2020 at 07:03 PM

Mark Logan:
Iran celebrates "Death to America" as a national day.
So let's give them a path to nuclear weapons.

Deap , 13 November 2020 at 07:11 PM

Ex-CIA analyst, Mich Rep. Elissa Slotkin refuses to back Pelosi for Speaker - anyone know her? https://www.newsmax.com/politics/elissa-slotkin-nancy-pelosi-democrat-house/2020/11/13/id/996905/ She wants more mid-West, and less Calif and NY, as the new face of the Democrat Party.

Fred , 13 November 2020 at 07:14 PM

Mark,

"It's hard to stand by and watch unspeakable evil go down when you have the power to stop it...."


I hear Trump is evil/Hitler/worse. I wonder if anyone who thinks that is true has the power to rig an election, or thinks they do?

jerseycityjoan , 13 November 2020 at 07:50 PM

Colonel,

You are right of course.

Are the people of America up for another arms race and a more or less cold war with China? I think the Chinese will give us a lot more trouble than the Soviets ever did.

And yet we allow their students to come here and learn all we know and their elites to bring their dirty money here and we give them green cards and citizenship and protect the money they took from the Chinese people. Not so smart on our part.

I am very concerned about all of this.

Serge , 13 November 2020 at 07:57 PM

What is the next theater of war that Biden's new friends will involve us in? I noticed lots of Cold War era conflicts are heating up lately, Ethiopia Morocco Armenia being recent examples. IS in Syria/Iraq is still castrated due to the continued mass internment of their population base in the dozens of camps, but they have established thriving franchises in Africa and their other provinces continue to smolder.

[Nov 07, 2020] CIA, FBI and the USA elections

Notable quotes:
"... Obviously the 2016 elections were just as rigged and choreographed (despite backfiring dramatically) as the most recent one, but who could have done the choreography? What organization could get the "Operation Mockingbird" mass media to sing in chorus? What organization that is deeply intertwined with the State Department that Clinton was the head of also has long-running plans like color revolution preparations, proxy wars, and covert actions around the globe that would greatly benefit from a seamlessly smooth transition of imperial figureheads? ..."
Nov 07, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

William Gruff , Nov 7 2020 13:40 utc | 24

"The seeds of this scheme were planted several months prior to the 2016 election when Hillary Clinton authorized a smear campaign against Trump..." --quoted by our host above.

In other words, this was initiated during the primaries, at which point Trump even being allowed to be a candidate in the general election was inconceivable. How could the Clinton campaign have known that the corporate mass media would be giving Trump hundreds of $millions in free advertising at that point? How could the Clinton campaign have known that the joke candidate could beat out serious career politicians? How could the Clinton campaign have known so early they would be facing off against the Great Orange Ogre in the general?

Obviously the 2016 elections were just as rigged and choreographed (despite backfiring dramatically) as the most recent one, but who could have done the choreography? What organization could get the "Operation Mockingbird" mass media to sing in chorus? What organization that is deeply intertwined with the State Department that Clinton was the head of also has long-running plans like color revolution preparations, proxy wars, and covert actions around the globe that would greatly benefit from a seamlessly smooth transition of imperial figureheads?

That would be the same organization that thinks crickets in Cuba are Soviet brain rays damaging its operatives' soft and fragile minds, so it really is no surprise that they screwed the pooch with their "brilliant plan" in 2016. They only managed to regain control of the imperial figurehead position in 2020 by using banana republic election fraud. Fortunately they have a lot of practice with that kind of work and they have Big Tech and the corporate mass media fully on board to help. It is quite obvious that they would have failed again otherwise.

Basically, we can take some comfort from the gross incompetence that the CIA has had on display for many years now.


Down South , Nov 7 2020 13:54 utc | 29

William Gruff @ 24

Timeline according to Wiki:

Trump was declared the presumptive Republican nominee by Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus on May 3.

In April 2016, an attorney for Hillary Clinton's campaign and the DNC hired Fusion GPS to investigate Trump. In June 2016, Fusion GPS subcontracted Steele's firm to compile the dossier.

William Gruff , Nov 7 2020 13:56 utc | 30

"The majority of Trump's recent tweets are currently censored. I don't care how misleading or even false they are. That's not for Twitter to arbitrate. People cheering this power-grab by unelected tech officials are authoritarian dupes" --quoted by our host

There is a shorter word for "authoritarian dupes" . It is "fascist" .

"Sure, we'll have fascism in this country, and we'll call it anti-fascism" " --Huey Long

[Nov 07, 2020] The US is essentially another colony to the multinationals

Nov 07, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Les , Nov 6 2020 19:30 utc | 121

The US is essentially another colony to the multinationals who can set up domiciles in tax havens, bribe politicians to enact favorable laws, and lobby for spending to enrich themselves. That's the reality, not the liberals versus conservatives. They also have the benefit of an unelected body that can enrich them through printing money which gives them more power to stop other fiscal stimulus. It's evident in much of the world where this is going on in the West. It is a variation of the Economic Shock Therapy applied by the West, except that the oligarchs are spared from the economic shock.

[Nov 07, 2020] Trotsky: Fascism is what occurred when the socialists don't have a solution to the problems.

Nov 07, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Nov 6 2020 20:26 utc | 131

The transcript of the Michael Hudson-Paul Jay podcast is now available here . Yes, it's a long read with much being a rehash of his many previous interviews. IMO, his newest most important point is the need for a revamped Constitution:

"Let's get back to fascism because that's very important. Around the time that Roosevelt made that comment [1938], Trotsky analyzed fascism in Germany and Italy, and he said that fascism is what occurred when the socialists don't have a solution to the problems.

"I think we are indeed emerging in that kind of fascism today because you don't have the left or the progressive interests really coming up with a solution to the problems. And that's because the only kind of solution is so radical that it can't be solved within the existing political framework and the existing legal framework. There has to be the equivalent of a revolution. [If] It's not going to be an anti-fascist revolution; then it'll be a fascist revolution. What we're seeing is that kind of a slow revolution....

"Now and all throughout Europe, it was the upper house of government, the House of Lords, or the Senate that tried to block any kind of reform, not only leading to socialism, but that helped capitalism. There had to be a political revolution strengthening the House of Commons relative to the House of Lords. And that occurred in 1909-10 in England. Now, here you're going to have a similar constitutional crisis in order to do the socialist policies that you mentioned. The crisis is not only because there's federalism in the United States, states' rights that are written in the Constitution, to have an economy that can rescue the American industry, and rescue the American working class, you need to rewrite the Constitution.

"But the efforts to make plans for a constitutional convention have all been done by the ultra-right, by the Federalist Society, and by the people that you and I have made fun of for many years. And I don't see any movement on the left to say the situation is so serious that we need a radical rewrite of the Constitution in order to become really a parliamentary democracy that can provide the political context in order to introduce socialist policies ."[My Emphasis]

He's correct. When you have a Bernie Sanders being equated with Leftism, then you have no Left.

[Nov 06, 2020] Trump now governs as a standard Republican

Nov 06, 2020 | crookedtimber.org

24

Hidari 10.22.20 at 5:32 pm

I'm not going to flog this particular horse to death, because, at this stage, if you are still seriously arguing that Trump is The New Hitler™ then there is no reasoning with you, but one of the innumerable differences between Trump's Republican Party and Hitler's Nazi Party (and Mussolini's Fascist Party etc.) was that the Nazis and Fascists were the 'New Kids on the Block'. In other words they are outsiders trying to 'break in' to the existing structure, usually with the help of massive ( non-state ) violence. And they were led by young, angry men, who bitterly resented the Establishment and simply demanded that they be allowed to lead (cf the fact that European fascists and Nazis invariably came to power after WW1: the view, common at the time, that this was a war when old men had led young men to their deaths, is highly significant here).

The American Republican Party on the other hand, is going on 200 years old, and is led by complacent, tired, wealthy old men. They are the Establishment.

The only way round this problem for those insisting that the United States, one of the oldest and most stable of all the Western Republics/democracies, now stands quivering on the verge of tyranny/civil war, is to claim that Trump is a radical, fundamentally different force in Western politics, that Trumpism has practically no antecedents (apart from Hitler etc.) and that Trump has radically and fundamentally transformed the Republican Party into something radically new.

Which is .obviously not true. There is little that Trump has done that Romney would not have done, most of Romney's supporters are also Trump's, and the amount of violence that Trump has unleashed (and the vast majority of this is state violence not non-state a huge difference between Trump and the Nazis) pales into insignificance when compared to what Bush Sr. did in similar circumstances, let alone LBJ/Nixon.

Far from terrifying the Establishment, Trump is openly ridiculed by it on late night TV (and, increasingly, daytime TV), and his inchoate and half-assed 'revolt' against Republican shibboleths has long since petered out: Trump now governs as a standard Republican, no ifs, ands or buts. You just need to ask yourself: what policy pronouncements has Trump made recently that Romney would not have made? The answer is that there are none. Romney might have managed Covid a bit better. That's it.

In any case, as has been tirelessly pointed out, there is simply no equivalent in the US Constitution for a 'total' Enabling Act of the kind that Hitler used. As Corey also points out, to describe the Nazi coup as 'constitutional' is a very big stretch: Hitler had murdered no small number of his political opponents by the time of a 'vote' which met no one's idea of 'free and fair'.

tl;dr The Republicans do not and will never rebel against the Establishment. They are the Establishment. Those who deny this are essentially arguing that the Republicans will overthrow themselves.

ph 10.23.20 at 7:49 am (no link)

Welcome back, Corey and congrats on the piece.

@24 You're right. The idea that literally a fascist would permit his government, his supporters, family, and himself to be mocked on halloween pumpkins (some of these are great), on SNL, by late-night comedians, on the front page of the press and by a very substantial percentage of the population doesn't say much for his authoritarian credentials.

Re: the OP and New Yorker piece. Plenty of Dems are just as conservative as Republicans depending on the issue. Nor, do the older distinctions of conservative/liberal apply – if they ever did.

Reform act politicians and those after were much of a kind – branding various forms of sexist and elitist capitalism to appeal to a wealthy minority of like-minded bigots. The issues were opportunities to exploit sinecures and alliances, utterly un-related to any sense of the public good.

So, what do we get in 2020? At the end of the final debate we saw exactly the kind of choice we'd expect to see from any Republican and any Democrat of the modern era. Biden offered big government, higher taxes, and better equality of outcome. Trump warned that electing the Democrat would make the country less safe and send the economy over the cliff.

Based on the Frank Luntz independents post-debate response, Corey's sound analysis of the GOP electoral college strengths, and Biden's weakness among African-American males, in particular, my current call is a Trump electoral college victory similar to that in 2016, and a similar loss in the popular vote. Biden didn't do himself any favors tonight by taking a hard stance on getting rid of fossil fuels. Winning Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania just took a big hit.

The Luntz independents also wanted to know why the media has suddenly stopped talking about Biden's Burisma email problem – now that actual evidence has surfaced. RUSSIA DID IT AGAIN!!!! didn't get much traction with this particular group.

Biden succeeded in looking like the same polished, lifeless, pol from the past who voters know so well, and who does so little to win their support, especially when he's on the media loves to call Biden's 'A' game. He presented himself as the only professional politician on stage: slippery, defensive, and evasive. In doing so, Biden convinced the independent voters Luntz polled to choose Trump over Biden by a large majority.

From the Luntz group: "Words to describe Trump tonight: • "Controlled" • "Reserved" • "Poised" • "Con artist" • "Surprisingly presidential"

Words to describe Biden tonight: • "Vague" • "Unspecific" • "Elusive" • "Defensive" • "Grandfatherly"

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/10/22/luntz_focus_group_confused_why_media_wont_investigate_hunter_biden_allegations.html

BlueHugh 10.23.20 at 6:20 pm ( 30 )

Today's GOP stool consists of the the Plutocrats, the Theocrats, and the Yahoos. Bush the Lesser won by being a Chimera of the three; Trump is a Plutocrat who bought off the Theocrats and made himself King of the Yahoos.

[Nov 05, 2020] Why I have so little confidence in the nice liberals with big egos- four reasons

Nov 05, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

Cassiodorus on Tue, 11/03/2020 - 9:14pm

1) Everyone is totally engaged in a debate over whether or not Donald Trump is a "fascist." Maybe he is. But, as I've pointed out in a previous diary , it's a weird sort of fascism that allows people the same freedom of speech and freedom of political action that they would have if Donald Trump were not President, and which in fact celebrates freedom . And indeed it is true that Donald Trump has shown what William I. Robinson calls "fascist tendencies." Robinson, for his part, projects "21st-century fascism" into the future. But, honestly, if this were 20th-century fascism, the type that actually came to fruition as fascism , you would not be reading this diary right now because it would have been censored out of existence. The state would be busy reimposing Jim Crow, and denying women rights in the manner specified in The Handmaid's Tale . It would have abolished democracy altogether, in a way that would prohibit those yelling the word "fascist" the loudest from voting him out of power. It took Adolf Hitler less than two months to establish a permanent dictatorship; Donald Trump has had four years at the pinnacle of power and does not appear to be even close to having the powers Der Fuhrer had. There is, by the way, a term for the ongoing dictatorship at the heart of our situation, the dictatorship that has persisted before Trump and during Trump and will persist after Trump; it's called "inverted totalitarianism," and it pervades the writings of Sheldon Wolin . Yet we are all obliged to call Trump a "fascist," in a sort of mandatory panic.

Saner voices have seen Donald Trump for what he is: an asshole and a troll. Yeah, let's vote him out of office, because who the f*ck likes being trolled? But those voices do not win the day, because there is nothing grandiose about not wanting to be trolled, nothing earth-shaking about saying "gee, aren't you tired of Trump's trolling of us? Let's get rid of him because he's a pest." There is also, I suppose, the attempts to abolish the Postal Service, privatize the public schools, and destroy the EPA. I put this stuff under "pest" because it's not clear that the Republicans under Biden won't try to do these same things under the radar. ("Under the radar," here, means "out of MSNBC's visual range.") The nice liberals with big egos thus appear immature for not being able to admit their (and indeed our) quotidian motive behind their (and indeed our) hatred of Trump.

2) The nice liberals with big egos are going to " Dump Trump, Then Battle Biden ." But there really is no precedent for the nice liberals with big egos actually taking on the party they've put so much energy into supporting so far, as against those evil Republicans. Is there going to be some point at which the nice liberals with big egos all say "okay, the Republicans are no longer worse, so you all have our permission to battle Biden"? It's easy to be skeptical about promises to do something that has never happened before, and that, given the way the system is set up, won't be likely to happen. The nice liberals with big egos need a contingency plan for when their vows to "battle Biden" do not reach audiences, and when the Biden administration tells us all "what are you going to do, vote Republican?". Such a plan would start, but not end, with the Movement for a People's Party .

3) The nice liberals with big egos still can't admit to the great forfeiture of Democratic Party power that happened under Obama. All branches of the Federal government, 12 governor's seats, and 900+ seats in state legislatures , from (D) to (R). It was the primary event of politics in this century, and it escapes their notice. When confronted with its reality, their explanations are lame to the point of not being credible. Come on, folks -- Obama preferred a party which didn't fight for anything YOU believed in, and all the while you were worshiping the ground upon which he walked. Admit it!

4) The nice liberals with big egos insist upon vast overestimates of the power of the Left in a situation in which the Left really has damned little in the way of any power at all. The Left had a lot of potential power in those two short periods in which Bernie Sanders was running for President. You could hear the conversations opening up -- Medicare for All, College for All, the Green New Deal. Okay, so let's go back to that atmosphere, and really put some enthusiasm into it. Or at the very least let's start with a realistic estimate of the power we have, and of the extent to which we've squandered that power by supporting neoliberals like Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama, and Clinton Two.

So there it is. If the nice liberals with big egos want to restore my confidence in them, there's where they can start.

[Nov 02, 2020] Do Something, regardless of how dumb, damaging and even making the situation much worse for those who they supposedly are claiming to help. DO SOMETHING! My response is 'WTF don't YOU do something youselves? Put your body, blood and mind on the line if you really care so much rather than typing on a keyboard thousands of miles away in great comfort. Keyboard warrior wankers!

Nov 02, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

ET AL November 2, 2020 at 2:14 am

I agree with all you points PO, rather those complaining about Russia are throwing a bunch of contradictory self-serving and ultimately emotional accusations and complaints that very much echo western foreign policy after the Cold War of Do Something, regardless of how dumb, damaging and even making the situation much worse for those who they supposedly are claiming to help. DO SOMETHING! My response is 'WTF don't YOU do something youselves ? Put your body, blood and mind on the line if you really care so much rather than typing on a keyboard thousands of miles away in great comfort. Keyboard warrior wankers!

Those actually running the west aren't much different which is why they go for the easy option of flying above 20,000ft and dropping bombs rather than sending very large numbers of troops to hold ground and have a quick result. Why? Because they are afraid of bodybags and how they might look. That is the crux. They're more afraid being turned against by the electorate so 'easy solutions' that look good but don't deliver are the order of the day. They just can't stand the real cost or be courageous enough to spell it out to the public that their words if taken at face value means quite a lot of death. It doesn't sell.


[Nov 02, 2020] The Near-Global Collapse of Critical Thinking The New Kremlin Stooge

Nov 02, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

PATIENT OBSERVER October 31, 2020 at 5:35 am

I don't understand the current situation in full context but it seems that Armenian leadership has whored themselves to Western interest. And the whore-wanabe's pictured above are eager to sell their souls as well.

Russia's take may be to let Armenia face consequences of that decision to align with the Western empire. And, it will be up to the Armenian population to remove the leadership that chose Western allegiance if they so chose.

Russian leadership (showing great wisdom in my opinion) shuns imposition of the-right-thing-to-do on a population that is too lazy or too fearful or too accommodating of a whoring leadership. Russia has learned its lesson about helping other nations at great expense to itself and then expecting gratitude or loyalty. As noted by others, the only nation to do such has been Serbia.

The above Russian strategy is likely predicated on the belief that the Western empire is wobbly and nearing the tipping point. Russian leadership appears to have concluded that it now time to disconnect Russia from the Western economic system to escape the coming calamity.

MOSCOW EXILE October 31, 2020 at 9:20 am

Moscow to provide assistance to Yerevan if hostilities spill over to Armenia

MOSCOW, October 31. /TASS/. Moscow will provide all necessary assistance to Yerevan in accordance with the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance between the two countries, if hostilities spill over to Armenia's territory, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Friday.

I am sure word will soon arrive here from Finland about this matter, namely about what Russia should do but, as a result of its inherent weakness, most certainly will not do.

MARK CHAPMAN October 31, 2020 at 11:30 am

You may find things different by mid-November, as Armenia has – allegedly – formally asked for Russian help. Here's a particularly pithy and realistic quote;

"In the modern world, you must either have your own heavily armed army combined with a strong economy that can support it, or you must be friends with those who have it (here's a hint, either Russia or China, because we see the results of Pashinyan and Lukashenko's friendship with Europe and the US online today). The usual liberal mantras of "Russia-Armenia-Belarus have no enemies" are good exactly as long as you are not attacked in reality, and not on the Internet or in the media. And no assurances of American and European friendship will save you. You'll be lucky if they don't take you apart themselves."

https://www.stalkerzone.org/pashinyan-started-to-understand-the-modern-world-order/

Remember when Pashinyan was elected, and the protests which swept him to power? Remind you of anybody? Poroshenko, maybe? Not to suggest Pashinyan is a powerful oligarch – to all appearances he is not. But he came to power by the same mechanisms – playing public naivety like a violin, quoting hopeful citizens who really believe a different face is the magic bullet which will blow away corruption, and receiving the benevolent blessing of the west that the election was just as fair as fair could be. It always is, so long as the western-preferred candidate gets 'elected'.

"Historically, Armenia's elections have been marred by fraud and vote-buying.

However, international observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe said the elections had respected fundamental freedoms and were characterised by genuine competition."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46502681

You'd think that kind of boilerplate would have lost its power to make me laugh, but by God, it still tickles me; "characterised by genuine competition" – oh, 'pon my word, yes! You, like others, may have noticed by now that all it takes in certain countries to eliminate any possibility of 'genuine competition' is advance polls which indicate the western-disliked incumbent will win easily. That's how the people plan to vote, but that counts for nothing – it's only 'genuine competition' if there is a realistic possibility the west's man (or woman) will get in, and the more likely that looks to happen, damned if the competition does not get more genuine. Nobody seems to notice that the 'competition' reaches the very zenith of 'genuineness' just about the time nobody has a chance of holding off a landslide win by the preferred candidate.

I think by now everybody who reads here knows how I feel about it; you can't really blame the west and its media outlets for behaving the way they do. The western countries are mostly run by wealthy venture capitalists, and what wealthy venture capitalists like best is acquiring and controlling more wealth. This should not be a surprise to anyone. Even when western venture capitalists are dead altruistic and benevolent, what they want is for more wealth and capital to be acquired and controlled by the country to whom they feel the most sentimental attachment, so that a few of their countrymen might do all right out of their maneuvering as well – these are the people who come to be regarded as 'philanthropists', like George Soros. But generally they are mostly in it for themselves.

No, what I find the most objectionable is the veneer of holier-than-though goodness which always covers western exploitation ops. They always have to pretend like a smash-and-grab crime is some kind of fucking religious moment just because it is they who are doing it, as if they bring rectitude to even the most blatant self-interest. When the truth of the matter is that what the powerful do not give even the tiniest trace of a fuck about – Locard himself could not detect it – is what life is going to be like afterward for the average citizen in the country targeted for exploitation by changing its leadership. You know, the ones jumping up and down in Independence Square (there's always an Independence Square), or walking around with big dumb grins on their faces as if they have just felt the planet shift under their feet.

It's worth mentioning here that the period during which the west – led, of course, by the United States and its government/venture-capital institutions – was the most optimistic about Russia was the moment when it looked like a class of wealthy venture capitalists was going to take over the running of what was left of the Soviet Union; the Khodorkovskys and the Berzovskys and the Abramovitches. The wealthy Boyars who, albeit they spoke a different language, really spoke the same language to the letter as their western counterparts.

And the official western perspective on Russia made an abrupt turn to the South, and grew progressively grimmer, the more evident it became that that was not going to happen.

PATIENT OBSERVER October 31, 2020 at 7:06 pm

"Venture capitalists" may not be the most accurate terminology for those who run the West. There are a lot of old power blocks including the Vatican, the British royals, Zionists and other groups who get along well enough not to openly attack each other but will protect their particular areas of dominance. Their glue are narcissistic/messianic beliefs of their right to rule humanity. There may be deeper and murkier layers in the ruling hierarchy. I say "ruling" but their rule is only to the degree that we do not care enough to resist.

The interesting thing is that these demonic forces are nearly entirely of a Western origin. Is there a genetic factor that has become concentrated in the ruling elites? Some other self-propagating driver of their beliefs?

I do believe that Russia and China are sorting and identifying the real actors in the Western ruling elites.

MARK CHAPMAN November 1, 2020 at 11:50 am

A very interesting and thought-provoking reply. I think we must be careful to not just 'study it, judiciously as you will', while 'history's actors' reshape reality around us.

ET AL November 1, 2020 at 2:28 am

It seems to me that whatever the behavior of Armenia, Russia is still expected to protect/save christians in the region regardless of all the s/t that is thrown at them and particularly knowing the blood thirsty history of Az/turcoman/whatever behavior against Armenians.

There is a point here as Russia presents itself as the leader of the Orthodox Christian world it is its actual duty to rise above (pthe etty nasty s/t) and protect christendom in the hood regardless

But, and as we all know, the having the cake and eat it crowd has only but expanded, most notably those who are pro-west. They are owed it and thus they demand it as they are considered and have been told that they are a cut above the rest. It's the same western 'benefit of the doubt' that allows its intellectuals to support successive foreign policy adventures that have ended in catastrophic failure but even worse left those that they pledged to help in a much worse position.

I also think that in this case most people really do not know that Armenia is run by a pro-western government. It's not exactly hot news. And its still not widely reported let alone. After all, the western media is not exorciating Washington, Berlin, Paris and London for doing f/k all to help Armenia. They've been mostly silent. No need to point out yet again that the west picks and choses which countries/territories to carve up in contravention of long standing international law, and which others it strictly abides by, in this case Nagorno-Karabakh.

This may well be in part of being stung by the highly successful and bloodless return of the Crimea to Russia which was done in line with international law regardless of western protestations. It really put their carving off Kosovo by extreme violence in an very bad light by comparison and cannot be denied any longer as 'not a precedent' if they claim Russia took over Crimea illegally. The West has really tied itself in to a gordian knot at the international and state level despite doing its best to ignore it at home. The rest of the UN members don't buy it in the least.

So back to the beginning, who to blame? Russia is the easiest target. Surely not the west who is also selling weapons to Azerbaidjan, buys its gas and give the dictatorship a free pass. And even less so i-Sreal selling weapons, another people that has suffered the fate of genocide. No. Russia has to do something!

ET AL November 1, 2020 at 2:51 am

And, or, is it also their argument that despite 'Russia not respecting international law' that in this case it is an 'exception' (but not a 'precedent' (!)) and their failure to do so is inexcusable? It really is the most gigantic load of bollocks.

PATIENT OBSERVER November 1, 2020 at 7:54 am

Just a few points – Russia's defense of Christendom may be limited to Orthodoxy as the rest are spinoffs or spinoffs of spinoffs. Christian religious values in the west hardly resemble core Christian values so why should Russia give a damn about protecting such Christians? If the Armenia Orthodox church is comfortable with, if not endorsing, LGBT? life styles, then they would likely be considered as non-Christian. I do not know if the forgoing is the case; just discussing implications.

Russia will fulfill its obligations to defend Armenia from armed attack. However, once Azerbaijan has gotten what it wants, there will be no incentive for an attack on Armenia and especially so considering the dire consequences of a Russian military response.

MOSCOW EXILE November 1, 2020 at 9:16 am

I remember when my wife asked an old priest here after our youngest's christening into the ROC if we could get wed in said church. He told her we couldn't because I wasn't a Christian.

She begged to differ, but he insisted that I was a heretic and would have to baptized according to ROC rights and after having had ROC catechism lessons.

He was right too and twofold: (i) all "Christian" faiths are heresies, aberrations of the true, correct liturgy as passed on from the apostles and (ii) I am a heretic of a pagan nature.

PATIENT OBSERVER November 1, 2020 at 9:57 am

I have a soft spot for pagan beliefs as well. There are nonphysical entities that we interact, mostly without awareness, on a daily basis. No big deal, we just need to be mindful of such realities to better understand why things happen the way they do. The Woke folks could not possibly understand such, being isolated in their hall-of-mirrors tight little self-contained world of self-importance with the firm conviction that they are the be-all and end-all. A peasant toiling in the fields or a kid in the slums understand reality better the the Wokest of the Woke. Am I serious? I don't know.

ET AL November 1, 2020 at 12:56 pm

I like trees.

There's a report the other day that China's massive planting of trees is estimated to soak up to 35% of the carbon dioxide it produces industrially. The data comes from ground level station, satellite and other sources.

Which leads me to this question. If farmers (in u-Rope) are now being paid not to grow food, then wtf not just plant forests of trees that can also be farmed and managed? Is it because it is too easy and there's not much profit in it?

I'm looking forward to steam Woodpunk.

MOSCOW EXILE November 1, 2020 at 9:29 pm

Trees are central to Germanic paganism. How can one not respect a tree such as the mighty oak that is at least 500 years old when mature and may live for 1,000 years and more? Such living things interact with us -- of course, they do, if "only" in the maintainance of an ecological balance of the gas that is necessary for our existence.

That bastard Charles "the Great" of the Franks waged relentless war for over 30 years against the Saxons (not the "Anglo-Saxons, but my kinfolk in what is now Lower saxony in Germany) because of their refusal to accept Christianity.

Too right they didn't, for they knew full that if they had, the would have fallen under the thrall of the person who styled himself as emperor of the Western Roman Empire that had fallen into dissolution some 300 years earlier, which reborn "Roman Empire" had as its state religion Christianity -- Roman Christianity that is, and its emperor, much later styled as the "Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation", was guess who? That's right, Charles the Great/Carolus Magnus/ Karl der Grosse/Charlemagne.

One of Charles' favourite tricks in subduing the Saxons was making public spectacles of hacking down their "holy" trees or " Irminsul . After one victory against rebellious Saxon pagans whose lands the Franks had invaded, Charles had them all baptised -- then had them beheaded, all 4,500 of them!

IN HOC SIGNO VINCES

That'd learn 'em!

See: Massacre of Verden

Einhard, Charlemagne's biographer, said on the closing of the conflict:

The war that had lasted so many years was at length ended by their acceding to the terms offered by the King; which were renunciation of their national religious customs and the worship of devils, acceptance of the sacraments of the Christian faith and religion, and union with the Franks to form one people.

Saxon Wars

So the Saxons started eating small pieces of bread that they were to believe was god, which is far more reasonable than believing that trees and rivers and forests and storms were worthy of their respect.

Right! I'm off to my holy grove in order to pay my respects to Woden.

Liked by 1 person

JULIUS SKOOLAFISH November 1, 2020 at 9:59 pm

Okay, you've baited me (love to spend more time here but I do appreciate the occasional glance and many great comments and discussions)

"But veneration is inherent in the human breast. Presently mankind, emerging from intellectual infancy, began to detect absurdity in creation without a Creator, in effects without causes. As yet, however, they did not dare to throw upon a Single Being the whole onus of the world of matter, creation, preservation, and destruction. Man, instinctively impressed by a sense of his own unworthiness, would hopelessly have attempted to conceive the idea of a purely Spiritual Being, omnipotent and omnipresent.

Awestruck by the admirable phenomena and the stupendous powers of Nature, filled with a sentiment of individual weakness, he abandoned himself to a flood of superstitious fears, and prostrated himself before natural objects, inanimate as well as animate. Thus comforted by the sun and fire, benefited by wind and rain, improved by hero and sage, destroyed by wild beasts, dispersed by convulsions of Nature, he fell into a rude, degrading, and *cowardly Fetissism*, the *faith of fear*, and *the transition state from utter savagery to barbarism*."

• "The Jew, The Gypsy and El Islam" by Richard Francis Burton

Like

MOSCOW EXILE November 1, 2020 at 10:57 pm

. . . Presently mankind, emerging from intellectual infancy, began to detect absurdity in creation without a Creator, in effects without causes

So what created the creator?


[Oct 28, 2020] Wall Street Banks, And Their Employees, Now Officially Lean Democrat

Highly recommended!
They understand who will serve them better... After all they are dependent on the continuation of neoliberal globalization.
Oct 28, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

You'd think that voting Republican would be an easy decision if you work on Wall Street, especially given the lower taxes and the removal of burdensome regulations. But Democrats have entangled themselves so deeply in the web of Wall Street, that the industry is now leaning to the left, according to a new report from Reuters .

The Center for Responsive Politics took a look at how the industry, and its employees, break down for the 2020 election cycle.

It has been obvious that Democratic candidate Joe Biden has been outpacing President Trump when it comes to fundraising, and this is also true of "winning cash from the banking industry," Reuters notes.

Biden's campaign has been the beneficiary of $3 million from commercial banks, compared to the $1.4 million Trump has raised. This is a far skew from 2012, where Mitt Romney was able to raise $5.5 million from commercial banks, while Barack Obama only raised $2 million. In 2012, Wall Street banks were among the top five contributors to Romney' campaign.

In 2020, campaign contributions to congressional races from Wall Street banks are about even. Republicans have raised $14 million while Democrats have brought in $13.6 million. About four years ago, Republicans pulled in $18.9 million, which was about twice as much as the Democrats raised. In 2012, Republicans raised about 61% of total bank donations.

Interestingly enough, when Biden and Trump are removed from the equation, the highest recipient from Wall Street is none other than Bernie Sanders, who has raised $831,096. Sanders often tops contributions in many industries due to his grassroots following.

When you remove the employees from the equation and only look at how the bank's political arms donate, the picture turns more Republican-friendly.

House of Representatives lawmaker Blaine Luetkemeyer of Missouri, one of the senior Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee, which is key for the banking industry, tops the list, hauling in $226,000. Next up is Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, the top Republican on that panel, with $185,500 in cash from bank political committees.

The top 20 recipients of bank political funds comprise 14 Republicans and six Democrats. Representative Gregory Meeks of New York, a senior member of the House banking panel, received the most among Democrats, with $140,000.

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The shift in data shows that while Wall Street's top brass may still understand the value of Republican leadership, bank employees themselves may overwhelmingly favor progressives.

ay_arrow

tonye , 3 hours ago

It's obvious. Wall Street is part of the Deep State...

Le SoJ16 , 3 hours ago

How can you hate capitalism and work for a Wall Street bank?

tonye , 3 hours ago

Because Wall Street is no longer capitalist.

Main Street is capitalist, they create the GNP.

Wall Street is a casino owned by globalists and bankers. They don't create much anymore.

Macho Latte , 2 hours ago

It has nothing to do with ideology. The Biden is FOR SALE!

Any questions?

Lord Raglan , 2 hours ago

It is because the majority of Wall Street are Jewish and **** overwhelmingly support Democrats.

David Horowitz has said that 80% of the donations to the Democrat Party come from ****.

KashNCarry , 2 hours ago

What a bunch of ****. Wall St. elites are in it up to their necks casting their lot with the globalists who want total control NOW. Trump is the only thing in their way....

artvandalai , 3 hours ago

Wall street people don't know much about the real economy. They also know little, nor do they care about, the real problems faced by business people who have to work everyday to overcome the policies put in place by liberals.

They do understand finance however. But all that requires is the ability to push paper around all day.

But let them vote for the Libotards and have them watch Elizabeth Warren take charge of the US Senate Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection Committee. They'll be jumping out of windows.

FauxReal , 3 hours ago

Wall Street favors free money?

sun tzu , 1 hour ago

Wall Street wants bailouts. 0bozo gave them a yuge bailout

American2 , 2 hours ago

Based on the massively coordinated MSM suppression of the Biden corruption scandal, now I know why these folks back Biden.

CosmoJoe , 2 hours ago

Democrats as the party of the big banks,

bgundr , 2 hours ago

Of course banksters favor policies that make the average person a slave with less agency

Homie , 2 hours ago

Especially if you like the endless bailouts, give-aways, and freedom from those pesky rules limiting the Squid's diet

You'd think that voting Republican would be an easy decision if you work on Wall Street, especially given the lower taxes and the removal of burdensome regulations.

mtl4 , 2 hours ago

The shift in data shows that while Wall Street's top brass may still understand the value of Republican leadership, bank employees themselves may overwhelmingly favor progressives.

The banks are big on corruption and that's one poll the Dems are definitely leading by a longshot.......thick as thieves.

tunetopper , 2 hours ago

Wall St youngsters dont realize their job is to whore themselves out as much as possible to the few remaining classes of folk they dont already have accounts with. The few Millennials and Gen Xers that have enough capital saved up are their target market. Ever since the take-down of Bear Stearns and Lehman, and the exit of many others from their Private Client Groups- the Whorewolves of Wall St are very busy pretending to be Progs and Libs.

And like this post says: " who really cares, they all live in NY, NJ and CT which are guaranteed Dem states anyway"

So in essence- they have nothing to lose while pretending to be a Prog/Lib. in order to ge the clients money.

radar99 , 36 minutes ago

I arrived to wall st in 2010. My female boss at a large investment bank hated me from the moment I criticized Obama. I was and still am absolutely amazed you can work on wall st and be a democrat

moneybots , 59 minutes ago

"The shift in data shows that while Wall Street's top brass may still understand the value of Republican leadership, bank employees themselves may overwhelmingly favor progressives."

So 50 Cent alone went Trump after finding out NYC's top tax rate would be 62% under Biden?

Flynt2142ahh , 1 hour ago

also known as MBNA Joe Biden friends, you mean the privatize profits but liberalize losses crowd that always looks for gubment money to bail out failures - Shocking !

invention13 , 1 hour ago

Wall St. just knows Biden is someone you can do business with.

Loser Face , 1 hour ago

Wall Street leans towards anyone who passes laws that benefit Wall Street.

Obamaroid Ointment , 1 hour ago

The Wally Street crowd has always been a bunch Globalist Mercedes Marxists and Limousine Liberals, this article is ancient history.

Sound of the Suburbs , 2 hours ago

US politicians haven't got a clue what's really going on and got duped by the banker's shell game.

When you don't know what real wealth creation is, or how banks work, you fall for the banker's shell game.

Bankers make the most money when they are driving your economy towards a financial crisis.

On a BBC documentary, comparing 1929 to 2008, it said the last time US bankers made as much money as they did before 2008 was in the 1920s.

Bankers make the most money when they are driving your economy into a financial crisis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAStZJCKmbU&list=PLmtuEaMvhDZZQLxg24CAiFgZYldtoCR-R&index=6

At 18 mins.

The bankers loaded the US economy up with their debt products until they got financial crises in 1929 and 2008.

As you head towards the financial crisis, the economy booms due to the money creation of bank loans.

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy.pdf

The financial crisis appears to come out of a clear blue sky when you use an economics that doesn't consider debt, like neoclassical economics.

That's what the banker's shell game does to your economy.

Bankers are playing a shell game, which you can't see if you don't know how banks actually work like today's policymakers.

The real estate shell game.

Watch this video of the S&L crisis to refresh your memory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwFXvc1rJDw

They were just cutting their teeth messing about transferring financial assets around in those days.

It's all pretty straight forward.

Bank loans create money out of nothing.

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy.pdf

Money and debt come into existence together and disappear together like matter and anti-matter.

It's a shell game; you have to keep your eye on the money and the debt.

The speculators pocket the money, and the debt builds up in the S&Ls until the ponzi scheme collapses.

US taxpayers then bail out the bust S&Ls.

The shell game only works when no when is looking at the debt building up in the financial system like the UK from 1980 – 2008.

https://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/forum/uploads/monthly_2018_02/Screen-Shot-2017-04-21-at-13_53_09.png.e32e8fee4ffd68b566ed5235dc1266c2.png

Money and debt come into existence together and disappear together like matter and anti-matter.

The money flows into the economy making it boom.

The debt builds up in the financial system leading to a financial crisis.

Banks – What is the idea?

The idea is that banks lend into business and industry to increase the productive capacity of the economy.

Business and industry don't have to wait until they have the money to expand. They can borrow the money and use it to expand today, and then pay that money back in the future.

The economy can then grow more rapidly than it would without banks.

Debt grows with GDP and there are no problems.

The banks create money and use it to create real wealth.

Caliphate Connie and the Headbangers , 2 hours ago

https://youtu.be/U06jlgpMtQs Democrat President, Republican Senate, Democratic House equals Deflation

medium giraffe , 3 hours ago

The banks and corporations of America have been welfare queens since 2008. Regardless of who wins, they will be the beneficiaries of moar US-style corporate welfare socialism.

Victory_Rossi , 3 hours ago

Wall Street loves globalism and hates the entire ethos of "America First". They're people with dodgy loyalties and grand self-interests.

FreemonSandlewould , 3 hours ago

What a surprise. The Banking Cartel faction of the Jish Control Grid sent Trotsky and company to Russia to implement the Bolshevik revolution. Should I be surprised they lean left?

Well I guess not. But they are at base amoral - that is to say with out moral philosophy. Their real motto is "Whatever gets the job done".

I know you human fungus in Wall St banks read Zh.

[Oct 25, 2020] The Trillion-Dollar F-35 Fighter Program Does Not Make Americans Safer

Notable quotes:
"... Overspending on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program does not make America any safer. The president's military spending increase is based on the false premise that more spending equals more security. More spending may even make America less safe by spending us into bankruptcy. ..."
"... One big problem with this massive spending on one defense program is that it gives interventionist politicians the tools of war that they desire. ..."
"... While some support this flawed program no matter how much it costs and actually advocate spending more taxpayer cash on it, Americans want that $1.7 trillion spent at home and not on a transnational defense spending program to defend other nations. ..."
"... The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program is not worthy of a massive investment by the taxpayer when it does not make America safer while also being a poorly negotiated government contract that has stuck the taxpayer with a massive bill. ..."
Oct 24, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Norm Singleton via The Mises Institute,

Overspending on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program does not make America any safer. The president's military spending increase is based on the false premise that more spending equals more security. More spending may even make America less safe by spending us into bankruptcy.

The F-35 program is expected to cost well over $1 trillion when it is fully operational and deployed. That massive investment will serve to enrich government contractors while giving interventionist politicians an offensive weapon of war. This program was created as a "too big to fail" scheme where once the government starts the process of making these fighter jets, they will have spent so much money that they can't back away. The F-35 program is a bad deal for the taxpayer while promoting a policy that will make these same taxpayers less safe.

It appears that the massive amount put into the program has purchased a lemon of a jet. The program has been troubled from day one and is currently experiencing some padding of the contract. On September 11, 2020, Bloomberg reported, "the Pentagon's five-year budget plan for the F-35 falls short by as much as $10 billion, the military's independent cost analysis unit has concluded, a new indication that the complex fighter jet may be too costly to operate and maintain." The plan for the F-35 for the next five years was an estimated "$78 billion for research and development, jet procurement, operations and maintenance and military construction dedicated to the F-35 built by Lockheed Martin Corp." This $10 billion mistake is going to fall on the shoulders of an already overtaxed taxpayer.

One big problem with this massive spending on one defense program is that it gives interventionist politicians the tools of war that they desire. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program contains a number of versions of a stealth fighter jet that can engage other aircraft and conduct military strikes. The goal is to use these aircraft as the primary fighter jets for the air force, navy, and marines. These can be used as offensive weapons in the hands of politicians who desire to engage in the endless war policies that have left the United States vulnerable to attack. This is a very expensive program that will not provide $1 trillion in security for American citizens.

Typical with government defense contracting, there have been numerous problems that have shifted significant increased cost onto the Pentagon. Defense News reported recently that the contractor was trying to stick the taxpayer with the cost of spare parts for the F-35. According to Bloomberg , the taxpayer received more bad news: "the F-35's total 'life cycle' cost is estimated at $1.727 trillion in current dollars." That is an insane amount of taxpayer cash and "$1.266 trillion is for operations and support of the advanced plane that's a flying supercomputer." When pressed by Bloomberg , a Pentagon spokesman bragged that a Pentagon "cost analysis office projects that the average procurement cost for an F-35, including its engines, is dropping from a planned $109 million to $101.3 million in 2012 dollars." Only in Washington would a bureaucrat brag about ripping off American citizens by just under $8 million less as a deal for the taxpayer.

While some support this flawed program no matter how much it costs and actually advocate spending more taxpayer cash on it, Americans want that $1.7 trillion spent at home and not on a transnational defense spending program to defend other nations.

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program is not worthy of a massive investment by the taxpayer when it does not make America safer while also being a poorly negotiated government contract that has stuck the taxpayer with a massive bill.

[Oct 23, 2020] Russia are mixed with Iran in a new wave of election hacking hysteria

Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... The sustained tosh from the good old boys at state, cia, fbi & nsa isn't worthy of comment, given that it is 100% evidence-free accusations which surprise surprise 'just happens' to align with these provenly corrupt organisations' most prioritsed foreign policy goals. ..."
Oct 23, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Silly Season

Washington Post , November 19, 2017

Justice Department pushing Iran-connected charges in HBO hack, other cases

Last month, national security prosecutors at the Justice Department were told to look at any ongoing investigations involving Iran or Iranian nationals with an eye toward making them public.

The push to announce Iran-related cases has caused internal alarm, these people said, with some law enforcement officials fearing that senior Justice Department officials want to reveal the cases because the Trump administration would like Congress to impose new sanctions on Iran.

Washington Post , October 22, 2020

U.S. government concludes Iran was behind threatening emails sent to Democrats

U.S. officials on Wednesday night accused Iran of targeting American voters with faked but menacing emails and warned that both Iran and Russia had obtained voter data that could be used to endanger the upcoming election.

The disclosure by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe at a hastily called news conference marked the first time this election cycle that a foreign adversary has been accused of targeting specific voters in a bid to undermine democratic confidence -- just four years after Russian online operations marred the 2016 presidential vote.

The claim that Iran was behind the email operation, which came into view on Tuesday as Democrats in several states reported receiving emails demanding they vote for President Trump, was leveled without specific evidence .
...
Metadata gathered from dozens of the emails pointed to the use of servers in Saudi Arabia, Estonia, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, according to numerous analysts.

Reuters , October 22, 2020

U.S. intelligence agencies say Iran, Russia have tried to interfere in 2020 election

The emails are under investigation, and one intelligence source said it was still unclear who was behind them.
...
... the evidence remains inconclusive.

The claims that Iran is behind this are as stupid as the people who believe them.

I for one trust (not) those 50 former intelligence officials who say that all emails are Russian disinformation. They are intended to 'sow discord' which is something the U.S. has otherwise never ever had throughout its history.

Politico , October 19, 2020

Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say

More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails ... "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation."
...
While the letter's signatories presented no new evidence, they said their national security experience had made them "deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case" and cited several elements of the story that suggested the Kremlin's hand at work.

"If we are right," they added, "this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this."

No, this doesn't make any sense. It is not supposed to do that.

Posted by b on October 22, 2020 at 7:21 UTC | Permalink


Debsisdead , Oct 22 2020 8:11 utc | 1


The sustained tosh from the good old boys at state, cia, fbi & nsa isn't worthy of comment, given that it is 100% evidence-free accusations which surprise surprise 'just happens' to align with these provenly corrupt organisations' most prioritsed foreign policy goals.

We know that these yarns align in syncopation with what the amerikan empire most wants to promulgate, yet bereft of even a a cunt hair's worth of evidence, the only truth which can be inferred from this foggy bottom tosh is the obvious one - that is that the empire is becoming so desperate they will happily toss their credibility with the many to the winds if they can, please sir, just convince a few of the few.

Tuyzentfloot , Oct 22 2020 8:14 utc | 3
Stuff like this is a suitable test of how the media are supposed to represent our interests and help us in not getting fooled. You report, and afterwards you test what your readers believe.

Independently of questionable bias issues serious newspapers will defend news like this with formal justifications of journalistic code
- neutrality and objectivity: we just report but don't judge.
- null hypothesis of trustworthiness: official sources are to be trusted unless proven otherwise. At least, proven otherwise by someone we consider trustworthy.
The propaganda is already embedded in the lofty ethics codes journalists will proudly adhere to.

Antonym , Oct 22 2020 8:42 utc | 4
"Other documents that have emerged include FBI paper work that reveals the bureau's interactions with the shop's owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, who reported the laptop's contents to authorities. The document shows that Isaac received a subpoena to testify before the U.S. District Court in Delaware on Dec. 9, 2019 . One page appears to show the serial number for a MacBook Pro laptop and a hard drive that were seized by the agency." https://www.ibtimes.sg/signed-receipt-hunter-bidens-name-delaware-laptop-repair-store-surfaces-52672

So the FBI kept Hunter Biden's bomb shell HDDs under wraps for almost a year. Enough time to figure out they where not filled with Russian kompromat.

Down South , Oct 22 2020 8:46 utc | 5
hunter-biden-story-russian-disinfo

Hunter's attorneys emailed the repair shop owner asking for the hard drives back.

Giuliani has handed over pictures of underage girls found in the laptop to Delaware police so we will know soon enough if they are fake.

Rutherford82 , Oct 22 2020 8:46 utc | 6
If you needed a leaked email to understand why it was corrupt for Hunter Biden to be getting 50k a month to be on the board of a Ukranian energy company, then you are likely already so propagandized that you will vote for Joe Biden no matter what gets printed.

Really this propaganda is a brilliant move for those who control what is in print. They have a clear circle of blame in Russia, Iran, or China, who are to blame for everything, and this allows the media to limit the scope of discussion greatly by suppressing real criticisms towards actual problems (the Bidens being corrupt across multiple generations) and deflecting that energy into hating Russia, China, and Iran, which are the main targets for imperialism. It is also a crude and vague lie to use anonymous sources to blame foreign entities for these types of things, which actually makes it an elegant argument for a simpleton as it is difficult if not impossible to disprove.

Because the media is really owned and operated by so few people who all have a hive-mind about money and power, the messages are consistent, even though ridiculous, and they resonate with many of the readers who really ought to know better, but have become inured to the damaging effects of the lies they have consumed for decades. Stories like these will keep working for a long time. If one of the sources in the article reported 'Up is Down, Left is Right!', there would be a wave of car accidents until they issued a retraction.

kiwiklown , Oct 22 2020 9:05 utc | 7
The Russians ( Putin / Lavrov) say ever so politely that the US is not agreement-capable.

I add that the US ( politicians, Wall Streeters, MSM, think tanks ) are:
-- not truth-capable;
-- not ethics-capable;
-- not shame-capable;
-- not honour-capable.

What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul?
He turns into a ghoul without a soul, says I, a devil without human-ness!
How dare they call us deplorables when they are the despicables?

Et Tu , Oct 22 2020 9:35 utc | 10
In America, Truth is a Foreign Agent and World Peace is a threat to National Security.
Miranda , Oct 22 2020 10:21 utc | 12
More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails ... "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation."

Do American journalists actually believe it's still in Russia interest to re-elect Trump? Washington-Kremlin relations have deteriorated rapidly under Trump.

S.O. , Oct 22 2020 10:32 utc | 13
@11 Miranda

It's quite doubtful many of them ever did. It's simply a useful control function.

kiwiklown , Oct 22 2020 10:49 utc | 14
Posted by: Et Tu | Oct 22 2020 9:35 utc | 9 -- "In America, Truth is a Foreign Agent and World Peace is a threat to National Security."

Nice one... Meet Mr Truth, un-registered foreign agent !!! and Mr World Peace, national security threat !!!

American leadership would not be so despicable IF they do not pretend to be "spreading freedom / democracy" when they wreak their global malice.

They do not even care for their own people (covid19 fiasco, anyone?), but pretend to care for the Chinese people so much they would regime-change the CCP; they pretend to care for the Russian people so much they would sooner shoot Putin's plane from the sky; they pretend to care for the Iranian people so much they block their access to covid19 medicines.

Circe , Oct 22 2020 10:50 utc | 15
To address the 2nd part of your post:

Here's a part of a comment I posted back in February 2020 that none of you took seriously.

Posted by: Circe | Feb 28 2020 20:29 utc | 124:

The planet of extremely bad karma SATURN is moving into Bloomberg's sign, Aquarius, right after mid-March and forming a square to Biden's sign, Scorpio. This is a very malefic aspect.

People under these two signs, Aquarius and Scorpio ie Bloomberg and Biden will experience obstacles, setbacks and challenges, create hidden enemies , and aging will be accelerated and serious health issues could emerge.

So I was criticized for injecting astrology into that election thread, mostly by AntiSpin.

Turns out as usual I hit the mark.

Bloomberg lost close to a BILLION dollars and failed badly in the primaries. That's what I call a major setback. However, as of December after a 6-month retrograde into Capricorn, Saturn is returning to Aquarius, so it ain't over for Bloomberg and things will get complicated for Biden , for the U.S. and the rest of the world.

I also stated back then that nominating Joe Biden would be a greater risk for Dems than nominating Bernie Sanders because Joe Biden was heading for serious astrological head winds relating to something unseen at the time involving a serious family issue.

While I was certain that whatever the issue was would come to light and could affect him in the Presidential campaign, I couldn't figure out the family aspect at the time, since he appears to have a solid marriage and tragedy is in the rear view now.

Last night however it all suddenly became clear and I've come to the realization that I was 100% right when I wrote that comment back in February 2020. Tonight I realized that the family issue...is Hunter Biden!

I was sounding the alarm that something bad would come to light because Saturn was headed into Aquarius, Biden's Home and Family sector squaring Biden's sign.

However, to make matters worse, it turns out that Hunter Biden is an Aquarian and Saturn the karmic taskmaster is headed on a collision course to upend his life.

At the time I wrote the comment I obviously couldn't predict exactly what would unfold, how or the precise timing, only that it would be bad and that's why I warned back then that Democrats should have chosen Bernie. I believed Bernie could beat Trump and I was right, because Trump is in total mental meltdown and self-destructing with his handling of the pandemic.

Now even if Saturn will square Biden's Scorpio that's not to say that Biden won't still win, but we are approaching a very bad full moon on October 31st. There is massive tension building, subterfuge lurking and the situation is going to get ugly. A battle royal is brewing. This is a powder keg moment.

Trump will not behave at the debate today. Must see t.v. With Obama's scorching speech yesterday seething in Trump's brain, and his Iran stunt unravelling and ineffective at distracting from the spotlight from Obama and the laptop bone clenched between his teeth; he's a rabid dog fit to be tied. Give him a padded cell, already.

As for the U.S. and the world: The pandemic started with Saturn crossing Pluto's path in Capricorn and entering full force into Aquarius in March when the world shut down.

So what will happen when karmic Saturn crosses Pluto again on it's way out of Capricorn and enters Aquarius for the next 3 years?

Fasten your seat belts everyone...we're heading into major turbulence. There's so much karmic tension gathering steam; it's very scary.

How much does it cost to get a trip to the moon?

I'll get back to sleazy Giuliani and his Pandora's box. There's too much to unpack there than meets the eye. Just know that when circumstances appear too convenient-it's because they are.

Trump's dirty play is a day late and a dollar short plus he's not playing with a full deck. Must be one of those Covid long-term effects.

It's time...to get these scum-sucking, misery mongers out of the damn White House already!

Jen , Oct 22 2020 10:56 utc | 16
You know the US government is suffering from severe Alzheimer's disease when it claims that Iran (of all nations) sent threatening emails to Democrat voters demanding that they vote for a President who authorised the murder of a popular Iranian military general back in early January this year.
Christian J. Chuba , Oct 22 2020 11:11 utc | 17
Kabuki theater on FOX

Brian Kilmeade and morning crew run the fake Iranian emails story by former CIA station Chief Daniel Hoffman.

Kabuki Actor Hoffman:
'[Uses opportunity to say Iranian Mantra] Iran has been attacking us for years, they have attacked our shipping in the Gulf (???, that's a new one) blah-blah-blah.
'Iran and Russia are attacking our democracy because that is what they fear most about America. Democracy would be the end of both regimes (Iran has no other motive to dislike the U.S. such as us killing their top General, the Stuxnet virus, murderous sanctions, ...)'
So they hate us because of our freedoms, a classic.

Kabuki Actor Kilmeade:
'Can't we do something about this?' [note, the U.S. is the perpetual victim, never the bully]
'Can't we pushback?' [The aggrieved victim, the U.S. is defending itself]
'Iran is doing this, Russia is sending bombers, can't we blow up an oil well?'

Kabuki Actor Kilmeade represents the entire degenerate U.S. public, unable to process information that views another country as having rational motives or our Intel agencies of being deceptive.

God, if you exist, You must hate this more than I do. How long?

Abe , Oct 22 2020 11:14 utc | 18
Guys.

All that rubbish is distraction. Discussing it is just playing to Borg's music.

They come up with so outlandish and jaw dropping crap that half he people thinks "it is so outlandish it gotta be true, who would lie so much?" and other half that knows better is in such a shock and disbelief that it needs some time to come to its senses and start tearing apart the lie piece by piece BUT.... Time is lost, distraction worked and MSM/Borg come up with next outrageous lie for next round. Russia, China, Navalny etc. etc.

And while marry go round Borg is doing it's deeds in dark while people is obsessing with Trump's knickers.

Debsisdead , Oct 22 2020 11:21 utc | 19
Barack oblamblam held off until as long as he possibly could, a move most likely connected to two realities, (1) not wanting to contradict what he, oblamblam said back in march "do not underestimate Joe's ability to screw anything up" and (2) Oblamblam's desire not to be found to be associated with sleepy joe's blatant corruption. Mud sticks n all that. Oblamblam was much more subtle in lining up wedges to be trousered. eg. Try as people might they have yet to uncover how a community worker turned prez found the dough to purchase a 45 acre Martha's vineyard estate off a notorious billionaire and Oblambam is reluctant to do anything which could prompt those questions,

Hence it wasn't until the 2020 election was mostly over that some DNC extortionists managed to convince oblam to say a few words, or else, to the Philadelphia african american males who chose to stay home on election day 2016.

Barack can claim 'he paid his dues' whilst keeping as much space as he can organise between himself and crooked joe, who has already brought oblamblam's prezdency into disrepute with the shameless & ugly ukraine rort that he and his bagman hunter had concocted.

There we mentioned the philly speech oh rabid, irrationally superstitious dembot.

Mark2 , Oct 22 2020 12:28 utc | 20
Here's my prediction
Trump re-elected I fortell will mean more racist murdering thugs on the street. an guess what they'l be In uniform and directly or indirectly trained by Israel.
And then there's the military presence on your streets -- you ain't seen nothing yet.
Wake the f up your gunna be massively oppressed by a fascist govenment ya skin couloir won't matter, nore who you voted for. You already live in a one party dictatorship.
ie the elite. Face it your redundant as a human being replaced by a micro-chip.
Revolt I tell you revolt !!
Mark2 , Oct 22 2020 12:37 utc | 21
The greater American public are about to become the next oppressed Palistinians ! oppressed devalued and slowly distroyed. Like a frog in a heated pan.
You won't notice till it's to late will you ?
No really, will you ?
librul , Oct 22 2020 12:52 utc | 22
Everything use to be blamed on witches. If your cow died - witches! If a tree fell on your fence - witches! If the reverend's wife died - witches!

Now it is, I lost the election - Russians, some ducks died in a park in Salisbury - Russians, someone fell sick - Russians.

When you hear, "Russians", just substitute in your mind "witches", the weight of evidence is the same.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rMsgmaBV8g

Witches must feel left out these days.

oldhippie , Oct 22 2020 13:14 utc | 23
So far Circe has Obama's speech described as fiery, blistering, and scorching.

Everyone else on this planet listens to Obama and falls asleep.

Jpc , Oct 22 2020 13:25 utc | 24
@ Tuyzentfloot 3

Journalism love's that high minded nonsense.
They write what they are paid to write.
Looking at the guardian wrt Assange
these clowns are beneath contempt.
Don't know if you are familiar with the box populi blog.
There a very good set of chapters from a book about journalist ethics.

pretzelattack , Oct 22 2020 13:29 utc | 25
i'm just surprised they haven't brought in venezuela and bolivia yet. that's supposed to be sarcasm, but reality keeps outstripping sarcasm. i am actually worried they are ramping up for a war in biden's first 100 days, either against iran or some serious provocation of russia like provoking some incident in azerbaijan and blaming armenia. they're f/n batshit.
pretzelattack , Oct 22 2020 13:32 utc | 26
mark2 i think you're correct about more jackbooted government thugs on the street, but that's gonna happen under either trump or crime bill joe/copmala. you're right about the israeli training too, they trained cops in that kneeling on the throat technique. field tested on palestinians.
pretzelattack , Oct 22 2020 13:42 utc | 27
iirc no ducks died, it's a miracle, the deadliest nerve poison ever invented is helpless against ducks. and house pets.
augusto , Oct 22 2020 13:45 utc | 28
Idiotic.
The united States was once a nest of excellence in nearly everything. Now it s a hub of naked idiocy.
The Russians have nothing to fear from the US or Nato, except in the economy but they can fix it. The Iranians have enough of what it takes to keep the Zio anglos away and at bay: thousands of missiles to target Israel, Saudiland, a 25 year economic alliance program with Beijing.
And clearly the time and opportunity where it was possible to still erase in a single coup the Iranian military might is over.
Josh , Oct 22 2020 13:46 utc | 29
Looks like they are imagineering again...
arby , Oct 22 2020 14:01 utc | 30
"Breaking WaPo: The U.S. government has concluded that Iran is behind a series of threatening emails arriving this week in the inboxes of Democratic voters, according to two U.S. officials. https://washingtonpost.com/technology/202"
Richard Steven Hack , Oct 22 2020 14:08 utc | 31
Posted by: librul | Oct 22 2020 12:52 utc | 22 When you hear, "Russians", just substitute in your mind "witches", the weight of evidence is the same.

Absolutely correct. You win the thread.

Neither Iran nor Russia nor China give a rat's ass about the US election. There may be literally thousands of private enterprise hackers who want to breach US election servers precisely to get the Personal Identifying Information which is coin of the realm on the Dark Web, but they couldn't care less about the election itself. It's physically impossible for any country outside of the US to significantly influence the election in a country of 300 million people - and every country knows that. The only country that *doesn't* know that is the US, which is why it spends scores and hundreds of millions of dollars - up to five billion in Ukraine, allegedly - to influence foreign elections. That's the level of effort needed to influence a foreign election more than the influence of the actual inhabitants of that nation. But every time some private group in Russia launches an ad campaign for a couple hundred thousand bucks tops, with zero effect on the US election, Putin gets blamed for some plan to mastermind the overthrow of "democracy."

It's a crock.

Christian J. Chuba , Oct 22 2020 14:21 utc | 32
I rather liked Obama's speech If for no other reason than the tone was completely different from the two candidates.

1. I'm tired of Trump's narcissism .

2. Can't stand Biden's fake 'I'm one of you'. He is corrupt, feels guilty about it, and has to reassure us that he's Lunch Box Joe .

I've noticed this about Biden for a while, he conjures up these fake memories ...

'You know what I'm talking about because I've been on that park bench at noon when you only have 20 minutes to eat your lunch because that whistle going to blow and you have to run back to your Tuna canning station or lose your job and with that your health insurance, car, and home.'

Okay this is not a literal quotation but it is a pattern and you know what I'm talking about :-)

Mark2 , Oct 22 2020 14:45 utc | 33
Pretzelatack @ 26
Yes to all you say their.
Re-reading my above comments they sound pretty harsh !
I am sorry, and do apologise !
It was part desperation and part morbid humour in the spirit of b's post.
Comparing Americans to a frog in pan may be a bit much !
I am in the U.K. we had a gen election one year ago !
I WAS THAT FROG IN A PAN.
Now I live in a pox ridden bankrupt banana republic run by a bunch of Israel bootlickers.
I don't go down well at party's.
Circe , Oct 22 2020 15:01 utc | 34
@19 Debsisdead

Barack can claim 'he paid his dues'

Hate to break it to ya all-knowing one...

obama-to-visit-miami-on-saturday-to-campaign-for-biden

And it's not superstition when the facts start to align with planetary motion.

How do you explain the Moon's effect on nature?

You think it's the only celestial body in the Solar System that influences life on Earth? That cosmic order is inescapable. Astrology is thousands of years old dating back to the Babylonians and has evolved through centuries of study and cannot, should not be dismissed as mere superstition.

I'm not an expert at all, but I recognize order and higher authority when I see it and believe me those planets are there for a reason and they rule everything. They're like carrots and sticks (IMHO mostly sticks). Now who put them there and to what ultimate purpose besides order and evolution is another matter.

I don't often bring it into a discussion, especially not to throw a discussion off topic, except when I intuitively feel fate present in important events both personally and on a universal scale.

This is a time of fated/karmic events, the pandemic being the most important (lesson) of these.

Paco , Oct 22 2020 15:05 utc | 35
Two hours delay and counting, Valday Club waiting for Vlad, something hearty must be getting cooked back stage...
Paul , Oct 22 2020 15:09 utc | 36
It's time for Grunter Biden to discover his inner Khazar and convert to judaism, why not it worked for both the Clintons and the Trumps.
Perimetr , Oct 22 2020 15:14 utc | 37
I think a more appropriate title would be "Fascist Season" . . . Fascism has come of age here in the land of the fee. The "intelligence agencies" create disinformation campaigns to overthrow the elected President while the "justice department" et al withhold evidence and fail to prosecute all the oligarchs and crooks who are busy censoring information and preparing to rig and disrupt the impending presidential election.

There are No Consequences for Anything when the Deep State and Central Banks run the show.

Of course, US corporate fascism has been developing for a very long time (see The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It ) . . . maybe more accurate to go back to the takeover of the US currency by the Federal Reserve in 1913 and the first Banker World War (see All Wars are Bankers' Wars! )

But technology and the "progressive" (pun intended) destruction of the US Constitution has led the dumbed-down US masses (don't forget Canada and Australia lol) into a whole new world of Orwellian lock-downs and wholesale economic destruction aimed at finishing off what was left of the US middle class. Soon we will have our cash taken away and replaced with a digital currency that can always be taken away or tailored for limited use, subject to negative interest rates that it cannot escape, etc. And all this is ushered in via hyperinflation leading to a collapse of the bond and equities markets, and finally the collapse of the US dollar (and all other Western fiat currencies).

Nothing like freedumb and democracy

Virgile , Oct 22 2020 15:27 utc | 38
The USA is so naive. They have been interfering in so many elections using money, blackmail,CIA operations. There was no way for other countries with less means to do the same to the USA. Now with social media they can, and they are absolutely right to take their revenge for all the troubles they got into with the USA plotting to promote a pro-US leader.
Now the battle is equal and the USA does not have the monopoly of interfering in other countries election!
Tit for tat...
Noirette , Oct 22 2020 15:32 utc | 39
All these stories are risible. Note the struggle to clarify who these 'malign' Régimes are attacking the US, and why.

Russia-R-R for Trump, but Iran-Ir-Ir for Trump doesn't quite hit the spot so now Iran is trying to damage Pres. Trump (from one of the articles..) .. is Iran trying to promote the election of Kamala Harris? What? Russia is for Trump and Iran against ?

The fall-back is a blanket, these evil leaders are trying to 'undermine democracy', influence 'US voters', meddle in 'our freedom-loving' politics, etc.

The attempt to stir up the spectre of threatening enemies far off is a hackneyed ploy. In the case of the USA, it is now melded with the promotion and control of planned internal strife, with internal enemies being natives (not islamist terrorists who sneak in and are under cover before erupting in murderous madness..) - Color Revolution Style.

-- BLM + Antifa haven't been active recently (or not in MSM top stories) as the election is approaching. Such would be upping the Trump vote for "law-and-order."

(imho from far off..) Many in the US don't take any of this seriously, it is just game-playing, false alarm, pretend concern.

"Oh wow, Iran is targetting Trump, did you know, real serious, did you hear, tell me is Zoe-chick divorcing that creep Edmond, I want to know, did you have that interview with Gov. X for the job? Is she hot? How much "

The credentialised class and the movers and shakers just roll their eyeballs, and the poor are in any case stuck in a desperado cycle of struggle against misery, what is going on with Putin / Iran / Xi is off the radar.

observer today , Oct 22 2020 15:39 utc | 40
Look! Look! A Squirrel!

Vilification of China (hate hate hate); claimed by the media and the pundits and our "Fearless Covid Conquering Leader" and all the good little parrots, to be the source of evil itself... Scapegoat extraordinaire... Hacking and Cheating and Aggressing and exercising Brutality towards its own citizens... The worst of the worst per our "intelligence" apparatus (and blind ideologues). Existential threat numero uno.

But wait!

The US is being attacked! Attacked they say; by all of the "bad" guys simultaneously.

The forces of evil out there are broad and out to get us. They hate our (imagined) freedoms.


Evidence (not):


Justice Department pushing Iran-connected charges in HBO hack, other cases

U.S. government concludes Iran was behind threatening emails sent to Democrats

U.S. intelligence agencies say Iran, Russia have tried to interfere in 2020 election

Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say


Invariably in all cases, The Voice of "Intelligence" (not bloody likely from ANY of this crew) deeply intoned to impart the "certainty", neatly encapsulated in the words "highly likely", delivered without a scrap of proof but loud, prominent, regular, mind numbing pontification.

Trust me! We lie, We cheat, We steal; and that is just the tip of the iceberg.

The US, all on its own, engenders distrust within the population because the US and all its political and Executive, and Legislative and Judicial and "intelligence" bureaucracies are corrupt to the core... Worse, they make no bones about it if you pay attention. And Partisanship is nothing but distraction because they are ALL corrupt and morally bankrupt; without empathy, remorse, sense of guilt or shame.

It was the US itself that thought it could subjugate the world through its faux "democratic" business practices and its claim of natural superiority... Its self declared Rules of Order instead of adhering to and supporting consensus established International LAW... Hegemon pompously declaring it has a RIGHT to Full Spectrum Dominance and slavish obedience.

Not the Iranians, not the Russians, not the Chinese, not the CCP, not the North Koreans, not the Venezuelans; none of them are disrupting, threatening or meddling in the US elections.

If you believe what the morons are smearing across the public consciousness through every communication medium possible you are a sucker... Totally disconnected any critical thinking faculties that may have been present. The very definition of sheeple... baaaa! (the sound drowns out reason and thought).

The rest of the World beyond NATO and Five Eyes isn't attacking the US or its institutions. They have all been attacked every which way from Sunday BY the US and its Satraps (targets of, victims of, and willing accomplices to our sophisticated excessively funded and supported global protection racquet).

The US, our Government, always blames our designated and non-compliant, non-obeisant existential threats for all the things we do to them.


And all this cacophony of alleged evil "attacks" from outside right now?

Look!!! Look!!! Over here!

Don't pay any attention to who and what decided to put us in the position we find ourselves in and what we have done to vast swaths of the world's populations "over there".

Now go vote for one of two degenerate teams, both of which are headed by supremely unqualified psychopaths.

Dissonance of cognition anyone? Orwell???

gottlieb , Oct 22 2020 15:43 utc | 41

The CIA really needs a new playbook. The Russia/Iran thing is laughable to the rest of the world, and to many 'Americans' as well. Unfortunately Partisans run the country, and those folks are addicted to the Kool Aid of MAGA – just different versions.

This October is like an Advent Calendar of October Surprises with plenty of time still on the clock for some great Golden Shower or Democratic child orgy deep fakes. Who the hell knows at this point – the acceleration of events this year makes Future Shock look like an Ambien commercial.

Trump is toast and good riddance. And sure Biden et al are war criminals and corrupt creatures of the Swamp. The Establishment is a much easier target to resist vis a vis policy than a crazy cretin without any policy but his own self-aggrandizement.

Lawrence Miller , Oct 22 2020 15:44 utc | 42
@15

[***]

"Astrology believers tend to selectively remember predictions that turn out to be true, and do not remember those that turn out false. Astrology has not demonstrated its effectiveness in controlled studies and has no scientific validity.[6]:85;[11] The study, published in Nature in 1985, found that predictions based on natal astrology were no better than chance, and that the testing "...clearly refutes the astrological hypothesis."[10] " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrology

Erelis , Oct 22 2020 15:50 utc | 43
As for getting voter US state voter databases, most states allow people to purchase part of a voter's information. Other parts like birth dates remain private. But the publicly available list is probably enough as it identifies party affiliation, voting history as when dates they voted (not how they voted). All the other private information is more useful to identity thieves and Indian scam centers. And as one poster noted, those databases like gold on dark web.

As for email addresses that implies those must be acquired through party officials and candidates off donor lists. Off hand I do not know that an email address is required to register to vote--I seriously doubt it. I know that Bernie famously refused to give his donor database to Hillary. The emails imply some sort of inside job or some false flag.

james , Oct 22 2020 15:54 utc | 44
@ librul | Oct 22 2020 12:52 utc | 22 When you hear, "Russians", just substitute in your mind "witches", the weight of evidence is the same.

ditto that...

vinnieoh , Oct 22 2020 16:04 utc | 45
Just read the story on Truthout of voters in Alaska & Florida, and possibly Pennsylvania and Arizona receiving threatening messages if they should vote against Trump. "We know you're a Democrat and we have access to your voting records..." Metadata indicates servers located in the kingdoms of Israel's new friends...

Well, I just went to the Board of Elections website for my county here in Ohio and I can, with a few clicks, generate a report from their site of a county listing of voters filtered in over a half-dozen ways - i.e. by Party affiliation and including addresses. Comes under the heading of "Voter and Candidate Tools."

So some concoct a tale which blames Iran, Russia, etc. for information freely available from your State's BOE? This information has always been available, but not exploited before in this way by US neo Nazis.

So, even though your ballot is secret, intimidation is easy to engage in based solely on Party affiliation of record. If Trump loses, should some people expect bricks through their windows, or perhaps fire-bombings? Trump and his supporters are certainly ratcheting up the apocalyptic messaging, working themselves into a frenzy - that is obvious and not even debatable.

I never read Dante; which circle of hell are we entering now?

Circe , Oct 22 2020 16:05 utc | 46
Everyone here knows I was 100% behind Bernie Sanders for the Presidency because I felt he was the right person for these times, but the mass is dumb and blind. I agree with the comment I read on the previous thread I think by someone called Horseman that portrays Bernie's goal as moving the Dem Party to the Left and not sheepdogging, but recognizing the stakes involved superceded Left purity.

At the same time I was totally against Biden because he is much more Zionist than Bernie, therefore more corrupt, as Zionism is counter-evolutionary being inherently supremacist, entitled, and undemocratic.

However, Trump is exponentially worse! He is a fascist Zionist and totally depraved. There is a choice here of monumental significance. Short term loss for greater future gain.

Biden is very flawed, but I'm inclined to view a man who suffered multiple life-altering tragedies to reach this point and who is grappling with embracing a son, Hunter, who probably was destroying his life, than a narcissistic less than evolved baby-man pig with a god complex who squandered life and daddy's money on material and artificial pursuit and has no notion of humanity, as the only sane choice.

Yes, Joe Biden should face his flaws and answer for whatever corruption exists in him, but that laptop issue should not be a reason to stop people from getting Trump, the most corrupt President in my lifetime next to Bush OUT. That goal is paramount. This is 2nd to the pandemic in fated events. If people do not make the right choices and learn something from these events then let this planet devolve into hell because that will be what is deserved! The stakes right now are astronomical and super-fated!

Don't blow a singular opportunity to get rid of that Fascist pig Trump over a laptop that's really a Pandora's box being used by Shmeagol Gollum Giuliani as a trap to unleash misery for years to come.

William Gruff , Oct 22 2020 16:08 utc | 47
This is clearly the Deep State and imperial establishment spouting obvious nonsense in order to discredit themselves and therefore to help in Trump's reelection bid! Henry Kissinger told me so! What incredibly subtle and intricate plans they have!

Or... maybe it is just a bunch of incompetent baboons in the Deep State control room randomly flipping switches and pulling levers in the desperate hopes that something, anything, works.

Nah! This is all part of the Great Plan! It just seems like abject stupidity because we cannot grasp its intricate complexities.

NemesisCalling , Oct 22 2020 16:20 utc | 48
All these new threads are defaulting to election threads. Sorry, b.

But I'll bite.

In the case of a Biden victory, which do you think will happen first?:

1) Renewed hostilities w/ Assad in Syria leading to his violent ousting and thrusting the west into violent confrontation w/ Russia...

Or...

2) Forcible entry into the Armenian/Azerbaijan conflict and establishing a no-fly zone...

Or...

3) a combination of both and would throw us into a direct confrontation with either Russia or Iran or both?

It looks like the demonizing of Iran is ramping up with the mail-threats telling dims to vote Trump or else. Dims don't like hostile, foreign powers helping the Don and swaying elections. It's a nice tip-off as to what Biden and the dim establishment might consent to once Obama-era sycophants and technocrats move back in to the White House.

karlof1 , Oct 22 2020 16:30 utc | 49
Seems to be the year of anniversaries; another's being celebrated today but not by the Outlaw US Empire. China & North Korea Celebrate 70th Anniversary of China's intervention in Outlaw US Empire's invasion of Korea , which is how it's being portrayed, "China, N. Korea stand together 'for self-protection against US hegemony' like 70 years ago" reads the headline at the link. To mark the anniversary, China has published an official history , explaining its decision "To resist US aggression and aid Korea, China had no choice but to fight a war;" the 3-volume work is The War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea . From China's perspective, it defeated Outlaw US Empire forces; so, it's not "forgotten" at all. Xi's using the occasion to give a major speech, the subject of which hasn't been disclosed.

Just 12 days to go until the refusals to abide by the outcome day arrives. If one wants to look, there's lots of illegal foreign influence happening but from sources that go unmentioned: Corporations that have foreign owners, which most do, who provided campaign contributions in any form to any entity associated with the election.

arby , Oct 22 2020 16:31 utc | 50
Gruffy said

"Nah! This is all part of the Great Plan! It just seems like abject stupidity because we cannot grasp its intricate complexities."

Perfect,))

karlof1 , Oct 22 2020 16:38 utc | 51
HeHeHe!!! The first bits of Putin's appearance at the Valdai Club today are being published . In a jab back at those accusing Russia of interfering in elections and such Putin said:

"Strengthening our country and looking at what is happening in the world, in other countries, I want to say to those who are still waiting for the gradual demise of Russia: in this case, we are only worried about one thing -- how not to catch a cold at your funeral."

There's more, although a transcript has yet to be published.

Circe , Oct 22 2020 16:47 utc | 52
@48NemesisCalling

There's a thread right before this one on International Events. Why don't you go spew your poisonous Trump Kool-Aid there instead of polluting with Trumpian-laced propaganda here?

I know-I know, Election threads raise the common sense factor further and that leads to Trump's demise, so you can't help but rush in to correct that dangerous shift. Why don't you do something equally meaningless like pounding sand down a rat hole?

vk , Oct 22 2020 16:53 utc | 53
After the Russiagate fiasco I thought the Americans had learned their lesson, but it seems I was wrong.

Honestly, this may be the beginning of an irreversible process of ideological polarization of the American Empire.

The thing is it's one thing to wage propaganda warfare against a foreign enemy to your domestic audience: the foreign enemy will be destroyed either way, so they will never be able to tell their version of the story, plus the domestic audience can give itself the luxury of living the lie indefinitely as it doesn't affect their daily lives. Plus they'll directly benefit from the conquest of a foreign enemy, e.g. cheaper gas to your car after the destruction and conquest of Iraq; the abundance in the shelves of Walmarts after the subjugation of China, and so on.

It's a completely different story when you wage propaganda warfare against yourself: the Trump voter knows he/she didn't vote for Trump because of Russian influence, while the Hilary Clinton/Joe Biden voter knows he/she didn't vote in either of them because of Chinese influence. But each part will believe the half of the lie that benefits them against the other, creating a vicious cycle of mistrust between the two halves.

Meanwhile, the American economy (capitalism) continues to decline. Time is running up:

US economy looks to be on indefinite life support from government, Professor Wolff tells Boom Bust

At the same time, there's excess money in the USA:

The Fed's $4 Trillion Lifeline Never Materialized: The Fed was meant to take $454 billion and drastically expand it. So far, it has lent $20 billion.

It was a shock-and-awe moment when lawmakers gave the package a thumbs up. Yet in the months since, the planned punch has not materialized.

The Treasury has allocated $195 billion to back Fed lending programs, less than half of the allotted sum. The programs supported by that insurance have made just $20 billion in loans, far less than the suggested trillions.

The programs have partly fallen victim to their own success: Markets calmed as the Fed vowed to intervene, making the facilities less necessary as credit began to flow again.

So, the very announcement of the Fed it would lend indefinitely and unconditionally made such loans unnecessary!

I didn't like it at the beginning, but the term "Late Capitalism" is growing on me.

mk , Oct 22 2020 17:16 utc | 54
This "Circe" chick is mentally retarded and should not be allowed to roam free outside a looney bin.

Oh boy is she not deranged.

elkern , Oct 22 2020 17:16 utc | 55
MSM pushing the the Iran angle shows that they are more anti-Iran than anti-Trump.

What effect would Iran intend by sending fake threatening emails from right-wing guns nuts to Democrats? I doubt it would discourage those Democrats from voting (for Biden), and I doubt Iran would think it would. The only effect it would have is to increase the fear, distrust, and disgust Democrats already have for those groups - which is "sowing discord", not "meddling with elections".

The Trump regime pushes this because it makes Trump look good & makes Iran look bad (at least the way it's been framed). MSM generally doesn't like Trump, but prints this because hyping fear & loathing toward Iran matters more to them than dumping Trump.

Paco , Oct 22 2020 17:17 utc | 56
Posted by: karlof1 | Oct 22 2020 16:38 utc | 51

Great that they are working on it, I was taking notes but kind of lousy its not easy to listen and write at the same time. Started kind of nervous, but right now it is Putin at his most relaxed and eloquent.

Paco , Oct 22 2020 17:22 utc | 57
Posted by: karlof1 | Oct 22 2020 16:38 utc | 51

It is interesting to see how Putin is way more at ease when answering journalist's questions than when exposing his part of the event. Right now they asked him about his image, punk, criminal etc etc. Answer: my function is the main thing, and I do not take it personally, now the chinese will ask.

Circe , Oct 22 2020 17:36 utc | 58
@47 William Gruff

In case the truth gets lost in your purposely misleading translation. This hare-brained scheme was cooked up by Trump and his newly-appointed right-hand bootlicker RATcliffe, at DNI and delivered to the American people by the latter as a desperate distraction minutes after Obama smacked down Trump on every air wave.

It immediately gave off an offensive odor, as I stated previously, of Trump turd floating in golden toilet.

And that's why Chris Wray looked so awkward and uneasy behind that RAT.

Tuyzentfloot , Oct 22 2020 17:45 utc | 59
@
Paco , Oct 22 2020 17:53 utc | 60
Three hours of serious talking about any and all world problems. I wonder how long Lunch Box Joe could hold on his own. The orange man probably could do it, but just talking about himself. The US need someone like VVP.
Circe , Oct 22 2020 17:53 utc | 61
@54 mk

Projecting much?

@57 Paco

I knew Paco was a strange name for a Russiabot!

Russia is now averaging 13,000 to 15,000 infections and close to 300 hundred deaths daily. I wouldn't laugh first if I were Putin.

karlof1 , Oct 22 2020 17:53 utc | 62
Paco @56&57--

I ought to listen while also reading the Russian close-captioning so I can rebuild my Russian language facility and catch the body language messages, but I still need to read/hear it all in English. As for his response to questions, IMO Putin knows what to expect from media reporters but not from other experts in the audience whose questions are usually more complex. Then there's the need to remain tactful, although there are times when he does need to get indignant, as with the issue of illegal sanctions that harm nations's abilities to deal with the pandemic--the utter immorality and inhumanity of the Outlaw US Empire that never gets the attention it deserves.

Haven't seen this nickname for Biden--Lieden.

Christian J. Chuba , Oct 22 2020 17:56 utc | 63
Fake emails: cui bono

What would Iran gain by scaring lower end of the spectrum Democrats into voting for Trump, is that desirable for Iran?

Ah ... but it was a pump fake, Iran thought that people would think that the emails were genuine, arrest a few of the Proud Boys and this would hurt Trump by associating him with a domestic terror group. Not only is this scenario convoluted but it is extremely risky because it might scare a handful of impressionable Democrats into voting for Trump and any investigation would uncover hacking of some kind.

Most likely suspect, Israel. They have the means to hack and the contacts in the U.S. to suggest Iranian origin.

karlof1 , Oct 22 2020 17:58 utc | 64
As Putin said, Russia was able to find "balance" in its reaction to COVID; and as with China but unlike the Outlaw US Empire, it put the safety of the Russian people first and foremost. The Empire is experiencing yet another big outbreak nationwide and has yet to put the interests of its citizenry first.
Mark2 , Oct 22 2020 17:59 utc | 65
Is Circe deranged?
I don't know but I doubt if she spends trillions of dollars each year on murdering inocent men women and children.
Mmmmm
Perhaps to people living in a ''loony bin'' (America) people outside must seem quite strange !
I live near Glastonbury finest bunch of people you'd ever meet. Not known for genocidel tendency's.
Any ways Iran, Russia interfering in America's elections -- -- - pure paranoid delusion (weaponised)
William Gruff , Oct 22 2020 17:59 utc | 66
The Mighty Wurlitzer has begun to sound more like the New York Philharmonic tuning up while riding the Empire State Express as it crashes endlessly into Grand Central Station.

Symbolism not unintentional.

Paco , Oct 22 2020 18:06 utc | 67
Posted by: Circe | Oct 22 2020 17:53 utc | 61

Dear Circe, each language is a world view, I wish I had the resources available today when I was younger, I would speak as many as possible, I consider that with the means available today speaking half a dozen would be no problem at all. You have the blessing and the curse of speaking english, so no need for anything else, but that is your problem, you are so relaxed about it that you're not able to spell correctly the name of one of your best known cities, San Francisco, with a c before the s.
Again, come up with something else, the bot label is as primitive as your knowledge of your own language and geography.

William Gruff , Oct 22 2020 18:06 utc | 68
"I doubt if she spends trillions of dollars each year on murdering inocent men women and children."

She votes for it, though.

Oriental Voice , Oct 22 2020 18:19 utc | 69
kiwiklown@14:
They do not even care for their own people (covid19 fiasco, anyone?), but pretend to care for the Chinese people so much they would regime-change the CCP; they pretend to care for the Russian people so much they would sooner shoot Putin's plane from the sky; they pretend to care for the Iranian people so much they block their access to covid19 medicines.

Well said, although rather sad! The last pretension reveals exactly the mentality that was behind the genocide upon the Native American centuries ago, resorting to tactics such as passing out smallpox infected blankets, dispensation of whisky, as well as outright slaughters of course.

Mark2 , Oct 22 2020 18:22 utc | 70
Gruffy @ 68
Maybe but she martches to a different drum beat. Not the trump drum beat of war that you follow, and will lead you all over the cliff.
Don't get me wrong ! You'd have to squeeze my nuts pretty dam hard (tears in my eyes) before I'd vote for Biden.
But you must know two things -- -
A. Trump is bat shit crazy and has his finger on the button whilst the Dems are money mad and there is know profit in Armageddon.
And
B. I'm antifa my hobby is smashing the filthy fascists !!
Who's streets ? Our streets !!
karlof1 , Oct 22 2020 18:43 utc | 71
Without mentioning its name, Putin in his speech pinned the tail on the donkey regarding TrumpCo's pandemic failure:

"The values of mutual assistance, service and self-sacrifice proved to be most important. This also applies to the responsibility, composure and honesty of the authorities, their readiness to meet the demand of society and at the same time provide a clear-cut and well-substantiated explanation of the logic and consistency of the adopted measures so as not to allow fear to subdue and divide society but, on the contrary, to imbue it with confidence that together we will overcome all trials no matter how difficult they may be.

"The struggle against the coronavirus threat has shown that only a viable state can act effectively in a crisis ..." [My Emphasis]

Yes, it didn't begin with Trump, but he sure did accelerate the process of making the domestic part of the Outlaw US Empire dysfunctional, which for me makes this "silly season" even worse than usual.

Sakineh Bagoom , Oct 22 2020 18:47 utc | 72
I view this as shit-against-the-wall policy. You throw it up there. Sometimes it sticks, sometimes it doesn't.
This is how lowly vermin do foreign policy nowadays.
Remember the story -- first reported as Russians, then Iranians -- paying bounty to the Talibs to kill (as if they needed motivation) American soldiers?
Well, in that case, I guess neither story really stuck, but you see where I'm going with this. It's all shite
William Gruff , Oct 22 2020 18:53 utc | 73
And silly season continues with self-proclaimed anti-fascists who don't know what fascists are.

Fascism doesn't necessarily have anything to do with race or religion. Is there any racial difference between Ukropians and Russians? Fascism is simply a tool that capitalists use to smash class consciousness. Literally any differences can be used by the capitalists to direct the violent mobs at their victims, even differences that are completely imaginary and don't really exist except in the group mind of the mob.

Now I wonder... who is it that will attack someone for saying "But ALL lives matter!" ? Who is smashing class consciousness?

karlof1 , Oct 22 2020 18:59 utc | 74
71 Cont'd--

And this is why the USA is turning into a failed state and Russia isn't:

"Nevertheless, I am confident that what makes a state strong, primarily, is the confidence its citizens have in it . That is the strength of a state. People are the source of power , we all know that. And this recipe doesn't just involve going to the polling station and voting, it implies people's willingness to delegate broad authority to their elected government, to see the state, its bodies, civil servants, as their representatives – those who are entrusted to make decisions, but who also bear full responsibility for the performance of their duties .

"This kind of state can be set up any way you like. When I say 'any way,' I mean that what you call your political system is immaterial. Each country has its own political culture, traditions, and its own vision of their development. Trying to blindly imitate someone else's agenda is pointless and harmful. The main thing is for the state and society to be in harmony .

"And of course, confidence is the most solid foundation for the creative work of the state and society. Only together will they be able to find an optimal balance of freedom and security guarantees ." [My Emphasis]

What a brilliant collection of words emphasizing the absolute requirement for the state to do its utmost to support and develop its human capital--its citizens--while also saying citizens have their own duty to ensure the quality of the state, which means installing representatives that will work for them and promote their interests first and foremost since they are the backbone of the state. Don't feed and care for the citizenry as in the USA and you'll have a corrupt, feeble state when it comes to keeping itself strong. And IMO the primary difference that's making Russia stronger while the USA atrophies is that Russia listens to its people and genuinely cares for and acts in their interests while in the USA the demands of the citizenry have fallen on deaf ears for decades, regardless the political party running the government.

Mark2 , Oct 22 2020 19:14 utc | 75
Gruffy is trying to conflate perpetrator as opposed to the victim/ victems !
Classic -- -
US geo-politics.
Blame shifting fascist tactic.
Learned far right tactic.
Or
Psychopathic projection.
Example -- --
US attacks Iran &Russia but blames them for attacking The US.
Also Gruffy I note how you side step a point well made by
Asking a deliberately distracting question. Yawn
William Gruff , Oct 22 2020 19:23 utc | 76
"Blame shifting" absolutely is part of smashing class consciousness. Shift the blame for people's difficulties from capitalism to various parts of the working class. Those who participate violently in this process are fascists and perpetrators. Of course, they are also victims because they are destroying their own class consciousness. Class consciousness is necessary if they are ever to be able to address the real issues causing them hardship.
Paco , Oct 22 2020 19:26 utc | 77
Posted by: karlof1 | Oct 22 2020 18:59 utc | 74

When the question and answers segment comes online it is worth reading his opinion about the Karabakh conflict and how it is a very difficult situation for Russia since both countries involved, Armenia and Azerbaijan are part of a common family. The question implied that Russia would unequivocally side with Armenia based on religion, to which Putin answered that 15% of Russia population professes the islamic faith and that he considers Azerbaijan a country as close to Russia as Armenia, with over two million nationals from each of the warring countries living in Russia and as part of a very influential and productive community.

Interesting too his take on Turkey, admitting that there are a lot of disagreements Putin had good words for Erdogan admitting that he is independent and that he is someone able to uphold his word, the Turk Stream project, it was agreed upon and completed, compared to the europeans to whom he did not spare in his almost contemptuous words insinuating their lack of sovereignty.

Mark2 , Oct 22 2020 19:38 utc | 78
Gruffy error !!
In this context the 'mob'
Is trump followers.
The thugs in uniform.
The proud boys.
The US forces abroad and at home.
Gruffy 'you' ARE the mob.
I feel you watched to many cowboy films portraying native Americans as the bad guys! It shows.
I won't be replying more. as I see your very shabby diversionary tactic. Nice try though. We see you !! What you are and what you do.
karlof1 , Oct 22 2020 19:46 utc | 79
Paco @77--

Thanks for your reply! Even before the Q&A Putin skewers both the Empire and EU in this paragraph:

"Genuine democracy and civil society cannot be imported.' I have said so many times. They cannot be a product of the activities of foreign 'well-wishers,' even if they 'want the best for us.' In theory, this is probably possible. But, frankly, I have not yet seen such a thing and do not believe much in it. We see how such imported democracy models function. They are nothing more than a shell or a front with nothing behind them, even a semblance of sovereignty. People in the countries where such schemes have been implemented were never asked for their opinion, and their respective leaders are mere vassals. As is known, the overlord decides everything for the vassal . To reiterate, only the citizens of a particular country can determine their public interest." [My Emphasis]

And that "particular country" is one where both the citizens and the government share "confidence" in each other such that they work in "harmony." Thus the #1 goal of the Outlaw US Empire to sow chaos within nations so such confidence and harmony can't be established; and if they are, then destroyed.

Kooshy , Oct 22 2020 19:50 utc | 80
No one has ever lied to American people more than the American regime and her terrorizing intelligence community organization, Snowden is the living proof of this . Anyone still alive and living on this planet if it ever believed a word on anything coming out of the USG not only is a fool and a total idiot but his/her head must be seriously checked. Regardless of their party affiliations they have no shame of lying cheating steeling those United oligarchy' Secretary of State is the proof that.
William Gruff , Oct 22 2020 19:58 utc | 81
This poster is on neither "side" . More like Putin looking in pain over Azerbaijan and Armenia killing each other at the prompting of some third party that doesn't care about either of them. This poster is neither faux left nor right wing; however, this poster's grandmother was Cherokee. There is no anger directed your way for your failure to understand, though.
Mark2 , Oct 22 2020 20:11 utc | 82
If Americans had any backbone they would be on the streets protesting about this sham election prior to the election, of false choice no choice.
You earn your democracy or you loose your democracy.
Iran, Russia bashing ! Just how low have you people sunk.
No hind sight, no insight and no foresight !
No hope. Spineless.
Jams O'Donnell , Oct 22 2020 20:36 utc | 83
Totally weird! You all, please get behind re-electing Trump. He is doing such a good job of destroying the US empire and its pretensions. If you are really a leftist, this is a GOO:-D thing!

The alternative is to vote Independent or Green but they don't have a chance right now.

Tom , Oct 22 2020 20:41 utc | 84
Posted by: Circe | Oct 22 2020 10:50 utc | 15

My horrorscope has Biden circling Uranus.

Kooshy , Oct 22 2020 20:42 utc | 85
Walking only 3 miles on Wilshire Blvd in Los Angeles , going west I have counted 47 homeless (male,females,wht,black,Asian)asking for handouts. These lost soles are the ones who have paid the price for the for ever wars to secure the Israel' realm,
The propose of yesterday's security show at FBI was to convince the public that all negative comments and cretics coming their way by internet blogs, email , media etc. is not really from disfranchised Americans public, but rather foreign countries operation that they do not like our democracy and way of life, It was solely meant to make people not to subscribe and believe what negativity they hear or read on US( non existing)democracy ,
This is a cheap standard operation by totalitarian regimes.


Mark2 , Oct 22 2020 21:07 utc | 86
Thanks kooshy for that and all your comments !
A true voice of sanity with heart and soul.
I hear you.
winston2 , Oct 22 2020 21:24 utc | 87
53
That money went to the ESF,what else do you think is levitating stocks and bonds ?
You assumed wrongly, but Kudlow let slip they(ESF) were broke and actually stated the money was going to them in a presser.
Debsisdead , Oct 22 2020 21:29 utc | 88
I dunno why I'm bothering to do this because astrology is such a lame easily disproven superstition that gets by because there are just so many con artists making predictions that occasionally some must be correct - the stopped clock effect, but here goes.
The moon's effect on our planet's oceans is proven to be caused by a known phenomenon, gravity. These stars whose positions we are told influence our human lives (just another anthrocentric load of bulldust what about beings on other planets?) are thousands of light years away from earth, meaning when the con-artists draw up their star charts or WTF they call 'em, they are looking at formations that happened thousands of years ago - all different depending on a particular star's distance from earth.
Claiming to be able to predict anything rational from such a mish mash of incorrect data is risible, sad really and goes much to explain the house dembot's mania.

As for oblammer in Miami? I guess the dnc know where quite a few oblammer bodies are buried.
My view is changing, Biden is so crooked that even though if he wins, the corporate media will try hard to leave him alone, but he's just too clumsy, so that some dems are going to side with the rethugs to impeach him and fast, however that may be what the oligarchy is counting on, as that brings bad karmala harris to the fore, a women so unpopular with dem rank and file she withdrew from the primary before any votes were cast, how's that for 'democracy'.

This is the real issue, both dem & rethug prez candidates are crooks through and through, if the dems win, then the spotlight the corporate media shone on orangeutan will be turned off. At least some of trump's worst rorts were stopped by a fear of being found out, but if the dems win dopey joe will have no such constraint - until he does something so over the top eg kick off nuclear war, that the media finally wakes up. too late but at least now they're awake.

Richard Steven Hack , Oct 22 2020 21:39 utc | 89
Posted by: vinnieoh | Oct 22 2020 16:04 utc | 45 If Trump loses, should some people expect bricks through their windows, or perhaps fire-bombings?

That is the threat. If either side loses, there will be massive civil unrest - at least it's very likely that is (part of) "the plan" - whatever the plan actually is. In any event, plan or not, it's predictable. Most of the preppers I follow on Youtube are urging everyone to stock up on food and water because there's a good chance that everyone will be back on movement restrictions of some sort, if not full-on martial law, within the next couple months. As I said before, this country is going to start looking like Turkey or Italy in the 70's when the Grey Wolves and the Red Brigades were terrorizing those countries. It may not be "civil war", but it's likely to be uglier than what happened this summer.

NemesisCalling , Oct 22 2020 23:01 utc | 90
@89 rsh

Massive civil unrest if Trump loses?

Wtf? You...smoking? Man!

Lol.

There will be cries of joy in the streets and maybe some celebratory looting, all from the urban left.

Trump's supporters might assemble peacefully in a very sparse manner, but I would bet most would simply take the newly alotted time from the Biden-victory to prep and ready a little more before the real fireworks begin. Violence would only erupt from the urban left attacking those demonstrations.

Real men are lying in wait. The city is not their playground any longer.

kiwiklown , Oct 23 2020 0:23 utc | 91
Posted by: Debsisdead | Oct 22 2020 11:21 utc | 19 -- "Barack can claim 'he paid his dues' whilst keeping as much space as he can organise between himself and crooked joe, who has already brought oblamblam's prezdency into disrepute with the shameless & ugly ukraine rort that he and his bagman hunter had concocted."

Thanks for your astute observations. Am learning much.

A compromised man never escapes blackmail: he is but a tool in the hands of his owners. It is not IF, but WHEN he will be used / abused. Over and over again, like a banker's boot stomping on his arrogant face.

But then, who is to say that Obanger Obummer was unaware of his VP, that Basement-Biding Bidet Biden's 'arrangements' for wealth accretion? And more (there is always more), who is to say that Obanging Ohumming gets NO share therefrom at some 'convenient' time?

Evil thinks himself clever to hide in the dark, yet lives in daily fear of the light. Thusly Obanging Ohummer's calculations that you noted above, and his dark demeanour these days. He knows he is walking on a knife edge, with a sword hanging over his head, and a safety net (those 17 intelligence agencies?) that can turn into a fowler's snare (sorry, mixed metaphors!)

Yet, looking at the happier demeanour (she used to scowl all through 2017/2018) on that shallow face called Michelle Ohummer, we can guess that she thinks they have escaped clean with their 'rewards of office'.

Christian J. Chuba @17 asked, "How long?" I ask, how does an immoral leadership ever going to turn moral? When does America get the leadership that she deserves?

Smith , Oct 23 2020 0:39 utc | 92
I doubt there will be much protests if Biden wins, the "right" in America is basically toothless.

There will be much violence when Trump wins though, much money will be spent to rile things up, just like when he won the first time.

Grieved , Oct 23 2020 1:00 utc | 93
@71 karlof1 - "only a viable state can act effectively in a crisis" - Putin

What a brilliant equation from Putin. Even more penetrating and useful than the formerly existing observation that socialist-style societies have performed best in response to the virus. Putin's criterion cuts exactly to the essence of the thing.

What the US has demonstrated from the virus response is that it is not a viable state. The benchmark now exists. Thanks for bringing it over.

Grieved , Oct 23 2020 1:03 utc | 94
@81 William Gruff

I have a friend of Cherokee ancestry. She told me how once she was speaking with an elder woman of the tribe, and described herself as "one-eighth Cherokee".

The old woman shook her head and said, "The Cherokee spirit cannot be diluted."

Yeah, Right , Oct 23 2020 1:18 utc | 95
Reuters: "The emails are under investigation, and one intelligence source said it was still unclear who was behind them."

No, it's perfectly clear who was behind them: Hunter Biden.

Honestly, the lies are now so brazen that they are no longer credible, they are just insulting.

Those are Biden Hunter's emails. QED the person "behind them" is Hunter Biden

Q: How do you know?
A: F**k me, dumbass: he wrote them, ergo, he is responsible for them.

Rob , Oct 23 2020 3:26 utc | 96
This comments thread reads like a collection of D-minus essays from a creative writing class.
Formerly T-Bear , Oct 23 2020 10:15 utc | 97
Should any here be interested, Wikipedia has aa extensive listing of governmental scandals for the 20th and 21st century administrations. Note the number of executive, legislative and judicial scandals for each administration. Note also the volume of scandals as administrations go from Franklin D. Roosevelt through to D.J. Trump for both executive and legislative branches. The political parties of the malfeasant are of interest as well - trending can be discerned, maybe, for the observant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College

Formerly T-Bear , Oct 23 2020 10:25 utc | 98
@ 97

That link should be:

List_of_federal_political_scandals_in_the_United_States

[Oct 21, 2020] How Trump Got Played By The Military-Industrial Complex by Akbar Shahid Ahmed

Highly recommended!
Tramp was essentially the President from military industrial complex and Israel lobby. So he was not played. That's naive. He followed the instructions.
Oct 21, 2020 | www.huffpost.com

On March 20, 2018, President Donald Trump sat beside Saudi crown prince Muhammed bin Salman at the White House and lifted a giant map that said Saudi weapons purchases would support jobs in "key" states -- including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida and Ohio, all of which were crucial to Trump's 2016 election victory .

"Saudi Arabia has been a very great friend and a big purchaser of equipment but if you look, in terms of dollars, $3 billion, $533 million, $525 million -- that's peanuts for you. You should have increased it," Trump said to the prince, who was (and still is) overseeing a military campaign in Yemen that has deployed U.S. weaponry to commit scores of alleged war crimes.

Trump has used his job as commander-in-chief to be America's arms-dealer-in-chief in a way no other president has since Dwight Eisenhower, as he prepared to leave the presidency, warned in early 1961 of the military-industrial complex's political influence. Trump's posture makes sense personally ― this is a man who regularly fantasizes about violence, usually toward foreigners ― and he and his advisers see it as politically useful, too. The president has repeatedly appeared at weapons production facilities in swing states, promoted the head of Lockheed Martin using White House resources, appointed defense industry employees to top government jobs in an unprecedented way and expanded the Pentagon's budget to near-historic highs ― a guarantee of future income for companies like Lockheed and Boeing.

Trump is "on steroids in terms of promoting arms sales for his own political benefit," said William Hartung, a scholar at the Center for International Policy who has tracked the defense industry for decades. "It's a targeted strategy to get benefits from workers in key states."

In courting the billion-dollar industry, Trump has trampled on moral considerations about how buyers like the Saudis misuse American weapons, ethical concerns about conflicts of interest and even part of his own political message, the deceptive claim that he is a peace candidate. He justifies his policy by citing job growth, but data from Hartung , a prominent analyst, shows he exaggerates the impact. And Trump has made clear that a major motivation for his defense strategy is the possible electoral benefit it could have.

Next month's election will show if the bargain was worth it. As of now, it looks like Trump's bet didn't pay off ― for him, at least. Campaign contribution records, analysts in swing states and polls suggest arms dealers have given the president no significant political boost. The defense contractors, meanwhile, are expected to continue getting richer, as they have in a dramatic way under Trump.

Playing Corporate Favorites

Trump has thrice chosen the person who decides how the Defense Department spends its gigantic budget. Each time, he has tapped someone from a business that wants those Pentagon dollars. Mark Esper, the current defense secretary, worked for Raytheon; his predecessor, Pat Shanahan, for Boeing; and Trump's first appointee, Jim Mattis, for General Dynamics, which reappointed him to its board soon after he left the administration.

Of the senior officials serving under Esper, almost half have connections to military contractors, per the Project on Government Oversight. The administration is now rapidly trying to fill more Pentagon jobs under the guidance of a former Trump campaign worker, Foreign Policy magazine recently revealed ― prioritizing political reasons and loyalty to Trump in choosing people who could help craft policy even under a Joe Biden presidency.

Such personnel choices are hugely important for defense companies' profit margins and risk creating corruption or the impression of it. Watchdog groups argue Trump's handling of the hiring process is more evidence that lawmakers and future presidents must institute rules to limit the reach of military contractors and other special interests.

"Given the hundreds of conflicts of interest flouting the rule of law in the Trump administration , certainly these issues have gotten that much more attention and are that much more salient now than they were four years ago," said Aaron Scherb, the director of legislative affairs at Common Cause, a nonpartisan good-government group.

The theoretical dangers of Trump's approach became a reality last year, when a former employee for the weapons producer Raytheon used his job at the State Department to advocate for a rare emergency declaration allowing the Saudis and their partner the United Arab Emirates to buy $8 billion in arms ― including $2 billion in Raytheon products ― despite congressional objections. As other department employees warned that Saudi Arabia was defying U.S. pressure to behave less brutally in Yemen, former lobbyist Charles Faulkner led a unit that urged Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to give the kingdom more weapons. Pompeo pushed out Faulkner soon afterward, and earlier this year, the State Department's inspector general criticized the process behind the emergency declaration for the arms.

Red Crescent medics walk next to bags containing the bodies of victims of Saudi-linked airstrikes on a Houthi detention cente MOHAMED AL-SAYAGHI / REUTERS
Red Crescent medics walk next to bags containing the bodies of victims of Saudi-linked airstrikes on a Houthi detention center in Yemen on Sept. 1, 2019. The Saudis military campaign in Yemen has relied on U.S. weaponry to commit scores of alleged war crimes.

Even Trump administration officials not clearly connected to the defense industry have shown an interest in moves that benefit it. In 2017, White House economic advisor Peter Navarro pressured Republican lawmakers to permit exports to Saudi Arabia and Jared Kushner, the president's counselor and son-in-law, personally spoke with Lockheed Martin's chief to iron out a sale to the kingdom, The New York Times found.

Subscribe to the Politics email. From Washington to the campaign trail, get the latest politics news.

When Congress gave the Pentagon $1 billion to develop medical supplies as part of this year's coronavirus relief package, most of the money went to defense contractors for projects like jet engine parts instead, a Washington Post investigation showed .

https://schema.org/WPAdBlock

"It's a very close relationship and there's no kind of sense that they're supposed to be regulating these people," Hartung said. "It's more like they're allies, standing shoulder to shoulder."

Seeking Payback

In June 2019, Lockheed Martin announced that it would close a facility that manufactures helicopters in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, and employs more than 450 people. Days later, Trump tweeted that he had asked the company's then-chief executive, Marillyn Hewson, to keep the plant open. And by July 10, Lockheed said it would do so ― attributing the decision to Trump.

The president has frequently claimed credit for jobs in the defense industry, highlighting the impact on manufacturing in swing states rather than employees like Washington lobbyists, whose numbers have also grown as he has expanded the Pentagon's budget. Lockheed has helped him in his messaging: In one instance in Wisconsin, Hewson announced she was adding at least 45 new positions at a plant directly after Trump spoke there, saying his tax cuts for corporations made that possible.

Trump is pursuing a strategy that the arms industry uses to insulate itself from political criticism. "They've reached their tentacles into every state and many congressional districts," Scherb of Common Cause said. That makes it hard for elected officials to question their operations or Pentagon spending generally without looking like they are harming their local economy.

Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, a Democrat who represents Coatesville, welcomed Lockheed's change of course, though she warned, "This decision is a temporary reprieve. I am concerned that Lockheed Martin and [its subsidiary] Sikorsky are playing politics with the livelihoods of people in my community."

The political benefit for Trump, though, remains in question, given that as president he has a broad set of responsibilities and is judged in different ways.

"Do I think it's important to keep jobs? Absolutely," said Marcel Groen, a former Pennsylvania Democratic party chair. "And I think we need to thank the congresswoman and thank the president for it. But it doesn't change my views and I don't think it changes most people's in terms of the state of the nation."

With polls showing that Trump's disastrous response to the health pandemic dominates voters' thoughts and Biden sustaining a lead in surveys of most swing states , his argument on defense industry jobs seems like a minor factor in this election.

Hartung of the Center for International Policy drew a parallel to President George H.W. Bush, who during his 1992 reelection campaign promoted plans for Taiwan and Saudi Arabia to purchase fighter jets produced in Missouri and Texas. Bush announced the decisions at events at the General Dynamics facility in Fort Worth, Texas, and the McDonnell Douglas plant in St. Louis that made the planes. That November, as Bill Clinton defeated him, he lost Missouri by the highest margin of any Republican in almost 30 years and won Texas by a slimmer margin than had become the norm for a GOP presidential candidate.

President Donald Trump greets then-Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson at the Derco Aerospace Inc. plant in Milwaukee on July MANDEL NGAN VIA GETTY IMAGES
President Donald Trump greets then-Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson at the Derco Aerospace Inc. plant in Milwaukee on July 12, 2019. Trump does not appear to be winning his political bet that increased defense spending would help his political fortunes.

Checking The Receipts

The defense industry can't control whether voters buy Trump's arguments about his relationship with it. But it could, if it wanted to, try to help him politically in a more direct way: by donating to his reelection campaign and allied efforts.

Yet arms manufacturers aren't reciprocating Trump's affection. A HuffPost review of Federal Election Commission records showed that top figures and groups at major industry organizations like the National Defense Industrial Association and the Aerospace Industries Association and at Lockheed, Trump's favorite defense firm, are donating this cycle much as they normally do: giving to both sides of the political aisle, with a slight preference to the party currently wielding the most power, which for now is Republicans. (The few notable exceptions include the chairman of the NDIA's board, Arnold Punaro, who has given more than $58,000 to Trump and others in the GOP.)

Data from the Center for Responsive Politics shows that's the case for contributions from the next three biggest groups of defense industry donors after Lockheed's employees.

https://schema.org/WPAdBlock

One smaller defense company, AshBritt Environmental, did donate $500,000 to a political action committee supporting Trump ― prompting a complaint from the Campaign Legal Center, which noted that businesses that take federal dollars are not allowed to make campaign contributions. Its founder told ProPublica he meant to make a personal donation.

For weapons producers, backing both parties makes sense. The military budget will have increased 29% under Trump by the end of the current fiscal year, per the White House Office of Management and Budget. Biden has said he doesn't see cuts as "inevitable" if he is elected, and his circle of advisers includes many from the national security world who have worked closely with ― and in many cases worked for ― the defense industry.

And arms manufacturers are "busy pursuing their own interests" in other ways, like trying to get a piece of additional government stimulus legislation, Hartung said ― an effort that's underway as the Pentagon's inspector general investigates how defense contractors got so much of the first coronavirus relief package.

Meanwhile, defense contractors continue to have an outsize effect on the way policies are designed in Washington through less political means. A recent report from the Center for International Policy found that such companies have given at least $1 billion to the nation's most influential think tanks since 2014 ― potentially spending taxpayer money to influence public opinion. They have also found less obvious ways to maintain support from powerful people, like running the databases that many congressional offices use to connect with constituents, Scherb of Common Cause said.

"This goes into a much bigger systemic issue about big money in politics and the role of corporations versus the role of Americans," Scherb said.

Given its reach, the defense industry has little reason to appear overtly partisan. Instead, it's projecting confidence despite the generally dreary state of the global economy: Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun has said he expects similar approaches from either winner of the election, arguing even greater Democratic control and the rise of less conventional lawmakers isn't a huge concern.

In short, whoever is in the White House, arms dealers tend to do just fine.

[Oct 20, 2020] 'Playing selective god'- Google 'whistleblower' tells Project Veritas that search engine 'skews' results in Democrats' favor

So we should thank Google for Creepy Joe is the Persidential candidate from Dems. Quality shows,
That also answers the question: Is Google evil?
Oct 20, 2020 | www.rt.com

In footage published on Monday, the conservative media watchdog shared around eight minutes of an interview with a man identified as Ritesh Lakhkar, said to be a technical program manager at Google's Cloud service, who accused the company of putting its thumb on the digital scales for the Democrats.

"The wind is blowing toward Democrats, because GOP equals Trump and Trump equals GOP. Everybody hates it, even though GOP may have good traits, no one wants to acknowledge them right now," Lakhkar said when asked whether Google favors either political party.


Project Veritas @Project_Veritas BREAKING: @Google Program Manager Confirms Election Interference In Favor of @JoeBiden Google search "skewed by owners and drivers of the algorithm" "Plain and simple trying to play god"

https://twitter.com/i/status/1318331575852011520

While Lakhar – whose LinkedIn page states he's worked at Google since May 2018 – did not specify exactly how the company gives an edge to certain political viewpoints, he suggested the platform is selling favorable coverage to the highest bidder.

"It's skewed by the owners or the drivers of the algorithm. Like, if I say 'Hey Google, here's another two billion dollars, feed this data set of whenever Joe Biden is searched, you'll get these results,'" he went on, blasting Big Tech firms for "playing god and taking away freedom of speech on both sides."

Lakhkar complained of a suffocating, overly-political atmosphere at Google, where he said "your opinion matters more than your work," recalling a dramatic response to Donald Trump's 2016 election win at the company. Several media reports have documented employees' appalled reactions to the victory, including internal company footage of a meeting soon after the election, where co-founder Sergey Brin is heard comparing Trump's win to the rise of fascism in Europe.

"When Trump won the first time, people were crying in the corridors of Google. There were protests, there were marches. There were like, I guess, group therapy sessions for employees organized by HR," he said.

I guess that's one of the reasons I feel suffocated [at Google]. Because on one side you have this unprofessional attitude, and on the other side you have this ultra-leftist attitude. Your entire existence is questioned.

PetarGolubovicRomanov 19 hours ago Nothing unexpected there - it always seemed a dodgy thing to me Google is 'the greatest' place to work. It must be to 'keep the lights on' with all their servers, but it is a company with what, two products - search and maps - and both have not changed almost at since they were created over a decade ago. Reply 5 2 Head like a rock PetarGolubovicRomanov 18 hours ago but it is run by the CIA so what do you expect? Mickey Mic 16 hours ago For the life on me; I just can't understand, why so many have faith in a system that has enormous disdain for them. Do the people really need the news to make the announcement ? Sadly, that is the case, because most can't think for themselves anymore, they rely on the narrative that everything is on a honest base system still !? The fact checkers don't check the facts, there is no such thing as a private large corporation with out ties to the intelligence apparatus. Big Company's are used by the shadow Gov. to gain the kind of wealth they need to stage their secrete plans of the NWO. People like Bill Gates, Fauci, only spoken in generalities, because they where only groomed to make the wealth for the advancements of the puppet masters agenda's. How many conspiracies must come true for one to think that the word "conspiracy" is only used to make others think, the next person must be crazy to think the way he does ? What the world needs is more common sense, and less dependence on the glow boxes in front of them. True wisdom, is only for the few that don't think the world is what they was conditioned to believe in. Ethnocentric pride creates a comfort zone; which is hard to break, it gets internalized though generations just like how holidays are created. Sadly, most wouldn't remember by next week; because the their brain is constantly getting flooded by squeals of events. And to top it all we have fake news to underline the long term memory bank system. Salman M Salman 14 hours ago Big tech companies represent the pillars of globalism which by definition supports only their people. The world after the elections will see their take over or demise.
Head like a rock TheLeftyHater 18 hours ago but those are both CIA creations, is that 'lefty'? Guns Blazing 14 hours ago Very old news, but worthy of repeating. Just watch that exchange in Congress between Senator Cruz and Dr. Robert Epstein. Google swaying millions of votes in favor of Democrats. Also top Clinton campaign donor in 2016 was Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

[Oct 20, 2020] Hello, Chrystia Freeland, I'd like you to meet Andrzej Duda

Oct 20, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MARK CHAPMAN October 19, 2020 at 11:29 am

Well, well – hello, Chrystia Freeland, I'd like you to meet Andrzej Duda, President of Poland. What, your Grampy was a Nazi collaborator, too?? You're kidding me – why, we're like brother and sister!!

"Polish President Andrzej Duda pursues a Russophobic policy and actively supports Ukrainian nationalists, because one of his ancestors was a Nazi collaborator who served the Nazi invaders and took part in the massacres on the territory of Belarus.

Ukrainian publicist Miroslava Berdnik, previously persecuted by the SBU, reported this in her Telegram channel, the correspondent of PolitNavigator reports."

https://peremogi.livejournal.com/53843440.html

CORTES October 19, 2020 at 3:23 pm

Eye witness account by an American immigrant of reaction in Sevastopol to events in the Maidan in 2014 at
"Auslander" 1.50pm on 19/10/20

http://thesaker.is/the-great-reset-our-way/#comments

The sequence of actions involving the "polite men in green" is different from other versions.

[Oct 20, 2020] NSDAP vs. Bolshevism

Oct 20, 2020 | www.unz.com

Matthew/Boston , says: October 13, 2020 at 11:51 pm GMT

@GeeBee

I agree. I roll my eyes every time. It goes to show how deeply embedded the false narrative of NSDAP is. Many otherwise bright writers use this same example. Use the Bolshevism of the USSR instead.

Invest time in viewing 'The Greatest Story NEVER Told' or 'EUROPA: The Last Battle.' They're both long, but comprehensive.

Matthew/Boston , says: October 14, 2020 at 12:02 am GMT
@Matthew/Boston

Bolshevism may not a good comparison to the common perception of Nazism as Hitler won over the loyalty of much of the German citizenry where Bolshevism was terror handed down to the population by the tyrannical minority at the top.

I lost all my editing time to a slow connection.

[Oct 19, 2020] Banking has an odd and opaque history of global control of money/finance and inciting wars

Oct 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

chu teh , Oct 17 2020 22:10 utc | 65

This in reply to your #131 yesterday re JP Morgan, oligarch power and method used to create Federal Reserve:

There is more. Banking has an odd and opaque history of global control of money/finance. It was clear by ca. 1900 that the global keystone was control of USA banking...but how?, because any USA legislation had to be signed-off by a President...the ONLY exception being overriding a pres. veto. It could not be done in USA by pres. decree.

So the riddle is how could this rip-off be done in a freak nation that was an open society of free public discourse full of very active politician? Even if Congress could be bribed and otherwise cajoled to pass such legislation, how could any President be "arranged" to sign it?

CLUE -- W. Wilson -- headmaster of Princeton University suddenly rose to Governor of New Jersey , then suddenly ran for Pres of US. A most weird election resulted in WW becoming Pres and in his first year signed the Fed Res Act. Boom! Done!

CLUE -- How did the bankers, Warburg et al, manage to put WW under their control? How did they select WW and get hooks so deeply into headmaster WW and get him elected Pres.? What was their secret?...and that could be kept secret? and never in writing.

The ANSWER might well be known only to surviving members of families of those involved in WW's mysterious medical maladies. Though WW's doctors never disclosed publicly all his medical data, related family members of consulted medical experts would likely have it as a family secret...that WW had an "unspeakable" malady whose diagnosis was quietly handed down to successive generations.

And IMO it is so.

[Oct 19, 2020] New report shows more than $1B from war industry and govt. going to top 50 think tanks

Highly recommended!
Oct 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Richard Steven Hack , Oct 17 2020 23:20 utc | 76

New report shows more than $1B from war industry and govt. going to top 50 think tanks
Esper's speech demonstrates a confluence of policies, ideas, and funds that permeate through the system, and are by no means unique to a single service, think tank, or contractor.

First, Esper consistently situated his future expansion plans in a need to adapt to "an era of great power competition." CNAS is one of the think tanks leading the charge in highlighting the threat from Beijing.

They also received at least $8,946,000 from 2014-2019 from the U.S. government and defense contractors, including over $7 million from defense contractors like Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Huntington Ingalls, General Dynamics, and Boeing who would stand to make billions if the 500-ship fleet were enacted.

It's all about the money. Foreign and domestic policy is always all about the money, either directly or indirectly. Of course, the ultimate goal is power - or more precisely, the ultimate goal is relief of the fear of death, which drives every single human's every action, and only power can do that, and in this world only money can give you power (or so the chimpanzees believe.)

[Oct 16, 2020] WilliamRD WilliamRD

Oct 16, 2020 | disqus.com

12 hours ago

Jacques Chirac President of France told Jr Bush if the United States finds WMDs in Iraq you put them there. The CIA and MI6 knew Iraq had no WMDs because Tariq Aziz Saddam's long time number 2 was a CIA asset. Back in the 1980s Aziz was a regular on the Washington cocktail party circuit and a frequent guest on CNNs Crossfire with Pat Buchanan, Robert Novak vs Tom Braden and Michael Kinsley. Finally Dick Armey Republican and House Majority leader was going to vote against authorizing the war in the fall of 2002. Cheney goes up to Capitol Hill pulls Armey into the Vice Presidents office in the Capitol and tells him that Iraq is close to having suitcase nukes and has very close ties to Osama bin Laden. Both lies of course.

On one occasion when Jr Bush was talking to Chirac he told him that the war on terror is Biblical prophecy. Needless to say Chirac was stunned. Yes the Republican establishment lied the country into one of the biggest foreign policy blunders in our history. Almost as bad as Woodrow Wilson taking us into World war 1 which led to the rise Bolshevik revolution and Nazi Germany

[Oct 16, 2020] Why the West Fuels Conflict in Armenia -

Oct 16, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Fazal Majid 15 hours ago • edited

Britain created Saudi Arabia? They supported the westernized Hashemites rivals of the Saud to the hilt. Just one of the many factual errors in a muddle-headed article that seems to draw its inspiration from the reflexive anti-Americanism of the European loony left.

The Caucasus, like the former Yugoslavia, or India before partition, is made up of many populations coexisting. When ethno- or religious nationalism rears its ugly head, violence and ethnic cleansing inevitably ensue. The Armenians prevailed militarily due to Azerbaijani incompetence, not because of any intrinsic moral righteousness, but the thing about military gains is they can be reversed when the other side gets its act together, specially if it enjoys an overwhelming advantage in population and resources.

Foreign powers like Russia, Turkey, Iran, France or Israel are pouring oil on the fires of revanchism for political or mercantile reasons, instead of pushing both sides to meaningful negotiations (let's not forget the Armenians are perfectly happy with the status quo and have not exactly been eager to negotiate it away). The last thing the US should be doing is taking sides, and since this is Russia's backyard there is not much we can do other than pressuring Turkey to stop making things worse, but we all know how little real sway we have with Erdögan.

S A Chaplin Fazal Majid 12 hours ago

@Majid - Very insightful comment, thank you. (And better written than the article.) You also taught me a new word: revanchism.

Blood Alcohol Fazal Majid 8 hours ago • edited

The article seems to me to be disjointed and I have feeling the damage was done during editing. There's no egregious mistake is saying the Brits created "Saudi" Arabia. That is a historical fact and which family/tribe they supported is irrelevant in historical terms. Your charge of "reflexive anti-Americanism of the European loony left." because of a few inaccuracies in the article is way off the wall. The article is badly written but it is informative.

Regarding your claim, "Foreign powers like Russia, Turkey, Iran, France or Israel are pouring oil on the fires...", I agree with you with the exception of Iran's role in this mess. The very first official announcement by the IRI, which I posted to another article on the site, warned Turkey is pouring fuel to the file. There's no disagreement there. Iran has no military personnel nor funding going to either country. Azerbaijan has about 700 Kilometers of common border with Iran, and Armenia shares about 32 Kilometers of borders with Iran. Iran has a substantial, vibrant and patriotic Azari population. Many are in top IRI leadership including Khamenei. Iran also has a very substantial and vibrant Armenian population. Iran does recognize the Turk's genocide of its Armenian population. Iran is connected to Armenia via oil and gas pipelines, as well as power grids. Iran is the most important of energy supplier for Armenia.

A bit of recent history will shed some light on Iran's behavior and attitude towards each country. While Armenia remained one of Iran's stalwart neighbors, Azerbaijan took the path of endearing itself to the US and Israel axis of war mongering and destabilizing policies. This put Azerbaijan on Iran's list of "unfriendly" governments, I'm not talking about Azerbaijan's Shia population in this context. There's nothing for Iran in this war. Therefore Iran's latest announcement is to end the war as soon as possible through diplomatic means. The shells and missiles have started landing on Iranian soil but no casualties fortunately.

Fazal Majid Blood Alcohol 7 hours ago • edited

The British had literally nothing to do with the creation of Saudi Arabia. Abdulaziz Ibn Saud took back his family fief of Riyadh in 1901 from the rival al-Rashid of Ha'il, then waged war over the other tribes of Arabia, enlisting a fanatical proto-ISIS like militia called the Ikhwan to conquer in 1924 the British-supported Hejaz ruled by Sharif Hussein of the Hashemite dynasty. He did not extend his conquests to Yemen, Oman, Kuwait or Transjordan and Syria because that would have meant waging direct war on the British and French empires, and in fact had to quell a rebellion of the Ikhwan who wanted to do exactly that.

The Saudis draw great pride in being the one nation in the Middle East that was not colonized by Western powers (mostly because it was worthless until the discovery of oil). Just because William Shakespear or Gertrude Bell toured the region does not make the al-Saud British puppets like the Hashemites were, whatever their many faults. While Abdulaziz bided his time and tactically made treaties with the British like temporarily accepting a protectorate status or agreeing to fight the al-Rashid (like he would do otherwise, they being his family's hereditary enemies....), they never provided him with any significant assistance, and in fact tried ineffectually to contain his rise.

Blood Alcohol Fazal Majid 4 hours ago • edited

I think if we remove "Saudi" from the discussion and just talk about "Arabia" our difference of opinion will evaporate. The country is mistakenly, in my opinion, was named "Saudi Arabia" for the Western colonizers' special interest. The rest of your argument about who did what to whom in Arabia is inside baseball to me.

By the way, stay tuned. We many start hearing about the al-Rashid as soon as the "king" passes and mBS tries be big cheese of Arabia.

redfish Blood Alcohol 5 hours ago

Of course Iran would just like the conflict to go away; its leaving them with only bad choices, whether that to be appearing to support Azerbaijan and alienating Armenia, with whom they have an important relationship, or appearing to support Armenia and alienating much of its local Azeri population. I think Iran publicly is walking a fine line and trying to stress diplomacy to solve the conflict as much as possible, though its still hard for them to extricate themselves from the politics of the situation.

Though, in that regard, its a bit wrong to compare the Azeri population in Iran to the Armenian population; its completely different in scale and importance. Iran has some concern that the Armenian-Azerbaijan conflict, if handled wrongly, would become regional or spill over into their borders, and they're less concerned about Armenia in that part.

Also wrong to not point out that Israel formed ties with Azerbaijan and Iran formed ties with Armenia around the same time; these were complementary moves, and its just as possible to explain Israel's ties with Azerbaijan as being as a result of Iran's ties with Armenia, rather than just the reverse. Just as well, Israel at the time had friendly relations with Turkey, which have since deteriorated. Its also true that the relationships are based on reasons independent of those kind of geopolitical moves, and are largely based on self-interest on both sides. Azerbaijan is also Israel's top oil supplier. Simply blaming all this on the US and Israel, and making Iran's stance towards Azerbaijan as a result of them being the victim of these types of deals, is a bit much.

Blood Alcohol redfish 2 hours ago

I doesn't seem Iran can or even thinks about extricate herself from "the situation". Iran is situated right there and whether things spill over to Iran or not will play a big role in Iran's perception of the regional security.

No sure where I inferred any comparison between the Azari and the Armenian population of Iran. They are BOTH Iranians. After the breakup of the USSR, the Azerbaijani dictator Heydar Aliyev established relation with Israel and later the US, while refusing to join any of the several post-Soviet economic arrangements. That was accompanied by Azerbaijan making noises about "unification" of Azerbaijan. That pushed Iran to throw all its support behind Armenia then. The situation has changed and IRI and Azerbaijan have normal relations.

Iran cannot simple afford to consider the Armenian Iranians less "important" than her Azeri Iranians, if that's where you are going.

Kindi 14 hours ago

The author may have been a banker, but he clearly was neither an historian or diplomat. He knows neither the details of what he writes, nor does he have a framework.

The decision to assign Karabakh to Azerbaijan was taken in 1921, not 1923 and was taken by the Bolshevik Caucasus Bureau, not by Stalin. General clashes between Azerbaijanis and Armenians took place in 1905, and the fighting for Karabakh proper erupted in 1918 with the formation of independent Armenian and Azerbaijan republics. Both well before the Bolsheviks or Stalin could do anything about Karabakh (although the Bolsheviks did join with the Armenian Dashnaks in March 1918 to seize Baku and butcher Azerbaijanis in the process. Yes, Azerbaijanis retaliated in September, but the Armenians did start it and got their hands plenty bloody, outside Baku as well).

The author's contempt for Azerbaijanis comes through in his comment that the Azerbaijanis have lost every time against the Armenians. He never reflects that the possible reason might be that the Armenians have been both better organized and more aggressive than the Azerbaijanis. He deliberately leaves out that Armenian expelled 800,000 Azerbaijanis from the territories surrounding Karabakh. He is stunning in his disingenuousness and ignorance. As for his framework, he has none. Where does he get the idea that Kosovo and Karabakh are interlinked and that they can be resolved through tradeoffs? Does he imagine that Muslims are one people and constitute a single union? Apparently.

An Arab world moving toward Pan-Arabism and socialism in 1924?!

As to the "Armenian settlement area" – the author might reflect on the Kurds' claims to 90% of that same area, and the bloody history of Kurdish-Armenian relations. If turning over old borders what do you do about Abkhazia, Circassia, and multiple places in the Balkans from where Muslims were expelled. Bring Greeks back into Turkey, too, while we are it? This article was not analysis, but uninformed blathering laced with ethnic invective. The Armenians have suffered enough to deserve such shoddy argumentation. AmCon should be ashamed to have run this.

BluStateConservative 12 hours ago • edited

Turkey regularly threatens Europe with opening the gates with their "refugees" as leverage in negotiations. Erdogan travels to the heart of Europe to encourage the Turkish diaspora to perpetuate their grudges on European soil and encourage them to flex their political muscle to further an Islamist agenda. They slaughtered Armenians, Greeks, and Syriac Christians- never acknowledging the crime or showing remorse. Now they seek to finish what they started with the Armenian Genocide- and the world sits on its hands claiming that both sides are equally responsible.

This is outrageous! Turkey has proved time and time again that it is the aggressor, using threats to get what it wants, and does not behave as an ally. Turkey has single-handily destabilized entire countries in its dream of Neo-Ottoman domination over the region. Time to heavily militarize the Greek- Turkish frontier, kick Turkey out of NATO, and put it on notice that it's adventurism in Libya, Syria, and Armenia will be met overwhelming force. Feeble responses made by the West will only encourage the mad-dog Erdogan.

M Orban BluStateConservative 11 hours ago

I don't think our (US) interest is threatened in those parts. Russia can handle it,it is their back yard.

BluStateConservative M Orban 3 hours ago

It calling for military action by any means, but we can apply pressure on Turkey.

former-vet 10 hours ago • edited

Explains well why Biden spent the other day criticizing the President for not taking a more active role in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict. Warmongers gonna warmonger. I assume that's one of the main attractions for Biden's supporters - more dead women and children in Asia. They spent eight years driving around with "Support America's Foreign Invasions" yellow ribbon stickers on their SUVs under the last administration Biden was part of.

With not a new war for nearly four years, I can understand why the establishment and Democrat voters are pissed. At least the fake "neoconservatives" are back in the party they belong in.

Blood Alcohol former-vet 9 hours ago • edited

War mongering is like Herpes. You can suppress it, but it's virus never goes away. Biden has had it for years. He supported W's war of choice in Iraq, which led to the carnage of thousands of American 20-somethings, thousands of mental illness sufferers and MILLIONS of dead Iraqi people of ALL ages. He is an unrepentant old neo-con war criminal.

[Oct 15, 2020] Antifa is real. It's violent. And you need to plan for it. - Zero Hedge -

Oct 15, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

by Simon Black via Sovereign Man

American diplomat George Messersmith found himself in an awkward situation while attending a luncheon in Kiel, Germany in August of 1933.

As lunch came to a close, the attendees erupted into song with arms outstretched in the Nazi salute.

First they belted out Germany's national anthem, followed by the anthem of the Stormtroopers– the paramilitary "Brownshirts" who violently enforced Germany's new social rules.

Messersmith was the US Consul-General overseeing America's diplomatic ties with Germany, so he politely stood at attention. But he did not salute or sing along.

Germans were required by law to render the Nazi salute, especially during the anthem; Hitler had been awarded supreme executive authority only a few months before, and he made the mandatory salute law of the land.

Foreigners, however, were explicitly exempt from saluting or singing the anthem.

But that didn't help Messersmith.

Even though he was legally excused from making the Nazi salute, angry Brownshirts menacingly glared at him for not participating in their rituals.

Messersmith later wrote in his memoirs that he felt threatened, as if the Brownshirts were ready to attack him.

https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890

"I felt really quite fortunate that the incident took place within doors. . . For if it had been in a street gathering, or in an outdoor demonstration, no questions would have been asked as to who I was, and that I would have been mishandled is almost unquestionable."

Messersmith was one of the few US officials who grasped just how dangerous the Nazis were in 1933. Others had to witness it first hand before they understood.

A similar event unfolded when a US radio host and his family found themselves amidst an impromptu Nazi parade in Berlin.

And in order to avoid Hailing Hitler, they turned their backs to the parade and gazed into a store window.

But several Brownshirts quickly surrounded the family and demanded to know why they did not salute.

The family explained that they were from the US and didn't know the customs in Germany. But the Brownshirts didn't care. The family was assaulted as police officers watched and did nothing to stop the violence.

News of these sorts of incidents quickly made their way overseas, and foreigners read the about Americans traveling in Germany being savagely beaten or threatened for not engaging in Nazi rituals.

But more surprising is that many foreigners actually sided with the Nazis.

Even the daughter of the US Ambassador to Germany defended the Nazis and their Brownshirt enforcers.

She said that news reports of these assaults and beatings were "exaggerated by bitter, close-minded people" who ignored the "thrilling rebirth" Hitler had ushered in for Germany.

Of course, we know in retrospect that these early warning signs were not at all an exaggeration. They were a small preview for what would come next.

Today we are obviously in a different time dealing with totally different circumstances.

But it would be foolish to ignore the early warning signs and pretend as if what's happening now is not a preview for what could come next.

This is perhaps best illustrated by a CNN reporter in Kenosha, Wisconsin back in August who stood in front of burning cars and buildings, with a violent mob all around him, yet declared the protests "fiery but mostly peaceful."

This willful ignorance of the undercurrent coursing its way through the Western world will not save anyone from the destruction it brings.

For example, just this past Monday, "peaceful protesters" in Portland, Oregon celebrated Columbus Day with an "Indigenous People's Day of Rage."

They weren't even pretending to be peaceful. They called it what it is: RAGE. That's literally the name they gave to their own actions.

Hundreds of people dressed in all black, covered their faces, and armed themselves with shields and nightsticks. They marched their way through the city, smashed windows, and forced any witnesses to stop filming and delete photographs.

A man who filmed from his apartment's terrace had lasers shined in his eyes and was doused in some sort of liquid.

The protesters tore down statues of Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. They smashed the windows of the Oregon Historical Society building, and unfurled a banner that said "stop honoring racist colonizer murderers."

Police did not even attempt to intervene until the rioters had been on the streets for hours and had already caused havoc and destruction.

(Ironically, much of the mainstream media still refuses to acknowledge that this group 'antifa'– the fascists who call themselves anti-fascists– even exists.)

It's obvious that a small, fringe, ideological minority has started to take control.

They have squashed civil discourse and free speech. Dissent is met with violence and intimidation. And if you dare to speak out, you become a target.

That could mean being "cancelled" by the Twitter mob. Or being accosted in public and forced to raise your fist. Several people have already been killed in protests across the nation.

When people like the former CEO of Twitter are calling for capitalists to be "lined up against the wall and shot," it's time to take the threat seriously.

This is far from the first time in history that a tiny fraction of the population has resorted to violence and extremism to force their agenda on an entire nation.

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Second, have a rock solid Plan B. This means deciding– in advance, when you're still calm and rational– what steps to take in order to secure your family's safety, your prosperity, and your freedom in a worst case scenario.

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[Oct 06, 2020] Only Full Transparency Will Save The CIA And FBI Now

Are they in any danger of destruction? I do not think that's true. They essentially control the US society being the cornerstone of the "Deep State"
Oct 06, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Roger Simon via The Epoch Times,

If The Federalist's Sean Davis ' informants are even half right, director of the Central Intelligence Agency Gina Haspel is making a big mistake - for herself, for the CIA , and, above all, for the country.

Davis wrote:

"Haspel is personally blocking the declassification and release of key Russiagate documents in the hopes that President Donald Trump will lose his re-election bid, multiple senior U.S. officials told The Federalist. The officials said Haspel, who served under former CIA Director John Brennan as the spy agency's station chief in London in 2016 and 2017, is concerned that the declassification and release of documents detailing what the CIA was doing during the 2016 election and the 2017 transition could embarrass the CIA and potentially even implicate Haspel herself."

What Haspel seems to be missing here is that the CIA, and the FBI , of course, have already been embarrassed, greatly, their reputations tarnished almost beyond recognition with tens of millions of U. S. citizens by the Spygate/Russiagate scandal.

She and FBI director Christopher Wray , deluding themselves that they are protecting vital institutions of our society, are apparently waiting with the proverbial bated breath for a Biden administration so that all revelations and potential indictments that might come via John Durham and William Barr are flushed down the equally proverbial memory hole.

It won't work. The only way to resuscitate those reputations is for them, Haspel and Wray, to be fully transparent, now , before the election .

Even if everything Durham and Barr are investigating is flushed away before reaching fruition, even if the Biden-Harris administration instantly installs a new attorney general and cleanses the DOJ and the intelligence agencies of all remnants of the dreaded Trump over night, tens of millions of Americans already know.

They have already seen at least parts of the story and they won't forget. How could they?

https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890

They know their new president Joe Biden and many allied with him have been implicated in a treasonous plot of previously unheard of proportions to upend the prior administration.

These same people, these millions, now distrust the CIA and the FBI, and, to a great extent, their government. They consider these pivotal institutions their enemies, working against their interests and, more importantly, the interests of the country. And these people are some of the most deeply patriotic of all Americans.

What a situation for our county! How can we then function as a democratic republic?

Did Ms. Haspel think about that? Did Mr. Wray consider that as he withholds or endlessly redacts documents, allegedly to protect who exactly?

(Wray has taken his desire for a Biden victory to such lengths that he tried to downplay the importance of Antifa.)

Haspel and Wray are doing the reverse of safeguarding their vital institutions. They are increasing public distrust of them, a distrust so great that many of us see our society moving inexorably in the direction of China, a high-tech tyranny of "social credit scores" and obedience to a Big Brother Orwell could never have conceived.

What is the road back from that?

We should be heartened, however, by reports today as President Trump was exiting from Walter Reed Hospital that the president was planning on declassifying and releasing many of these documents himself within days. His chief of staff Mark Meadows was said to have a briefcase stuffed with them.

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Perhaps, by the time you read this, you will know more.

If so, Haspel and Wray, to use another old proverb, will have missed the boat. Everyone will know that their agencies need a thorough house cleaning and it will be done, as it should be, without them.

And I will add, although the media will shout the contrary to the hills, though this is October, revealing these documents is in no way an October Surprise. This is information We the People (remember them?) were owed years ago.

When you have been deliberately deceived, that's no October Surprise. That's justice.


SilverRhino , 25 minutes ago

We are WELL beyond saving the FBI or the CIA.

Thucydides , 22 minutes ago

Full transparency will end up with all of them at Leavenworth KS.

Macho Latte , 11 minutes ago

CIA, and the FBI , of course, have already been embarrassed

Embarrassed? JFC! The author is the one who is delusional.

CIA, DOJ & FBI are corrupt DemonRat from top to bottom.

NoDebt , 9 minutes ago

The title to this article has to be one of the most darkly funny ones I've ever read on ZH: "Only Full Transparency Will Save The CIA And FBI Now"

It's not just that they will never be transparent because obfuscation and opacity are their stock-in-trade. It's that the idea that somehow becoming the opposite of what they are (and were born to be) would "save" them.

That's like saying that auditing The Fed would "save" them. Or that fish should get out of the water so they can breathe better. It's ridiculous in the extreme. It would kill them. Which is why they don't do it. And never will.

ze_vodka , 26 minutes ago

Nope.

In 2010, I thought the FBI and CIA were OK.

Now I know full well that they serve only a single purpose... to harass, imprison, and kill Americans who deviate from the preferred narrative.

Tenebrose , 24 minutes ago

"National Security" means the status quo in this our brave new America

And that is whatever we say it is, slave

Unknown User , 26 minutes ago

JFK tried to shut down the CIA, so they shot him.

namrider , 20 minutes ago

Deep State protecting themselves. C LIE A, FBLIE. Their purpose is NOT PUBLIC SAFETY, it is deception. On behalf of their masters they have created an upsidedown world where it is "legal" for them to lie, but not the public - this is bassackwards, they work for us, not the other way around (except we know who they actually work for).

Both agencies should be 100% eliminated - same with the fake "Patriot Act" and all the fake agencies it created.

When you pursue "safety" you wind up with neither safety nor FREEDOM.

2banana , 23 minutes ago

obama wesponized the FBI, CIA, DOJ, IRS and EPA to go after political enemies and those who just had different viewpoints.

The left cheered. The fake legacy media cheered.

And now no one trusts any of them.

To include those on the left.

The Chicago Way.

spam filter , 8 minutes ago

Is a community organizer synonymous with organized crime boss? Obama will go down as the most corrupt potus in history.

Yen Cross , 6 minutes ago

Devin Nunez, suggested during very compelling house testimony, that these agencies be shuttered until they're cleansed.

Pretty good idea, based on all the horse **** we've been fed?

Nelbev , 12 minutes ago

The CIA has admittingly been engineering elections round the planet for years, it was just under Brennan that they turned covert ways inward to US to get Hillary elected and keep incumbent demoncrats in control. Brennan should be in prison. Haspel ran the London CIA in 2016, thus helped or was congnizant of Halper, 5 eyes spying on Trump campaign people like, coordination to get Papadopoulos to start Crossfire Hurricane. Haspel just covering her ***. Not enough Kentucky bourbon to save her. Liked her deal in with Mohammed bin Salman to cover up his assassination of Khashoggi in Tukey, what a charmer .

spam filter , 18 minutes ago

What does government do when caught in the wrong? They arrogantly double down. Government rarely admits wrongdoing. They're hinging their hopes on Biden winning, at all costs. Look for the dirtiest tricks in political history, and i think we've already witnessed germ warfare unleashed on the Potus by those elements who have the most to lose in a Trump win.

Fuster-cluck , 5 minutes ago

100 years ago a spy was correctly considered despicable - at the level of child molester or lower. Governments and militaries held their noses and used them even while disgusted.

Somehow since the 50's onward spies became glorified (probably James Bond), and today spying is pervasive, from the cameras in our houses, to Google, to the 3 letter agencies.

Somehow we need to get the right attitude back. A spy is repugnant slime. They would foul a cesspit, and no decent person would allow such filth in their house, much less at their table.

There is no path to grace for the agencies, nor should we seek one. Eradicate every last one of them and desecrate their memory.

PGR88 , 13 minutes ago

The idea that the CIA and FBI are in any danger from public opinion is preposterous. They are in no danger because as perhaps the most important arms of the deep state, they will have total protection from other arms of the deep-state; media, entertainment, business, government bureaucracy, etc...

LEEPERMAX , 15 minutes ago

Gatestone Institute

CIA DIRECTOR HASPEL AND THE ANTI-TRUMP CONSPIRATORS

David Wooten , 17 minutes ago

"What is the road back from that?"

This is not just about Russiagate. It's also about Syria, including jihadists who imposed Sharia law on portions of Syria they controlled with the aid of the CIA and false flag chemical weapons attacks. Horrendous war crimes were inflicted, evidence for which has been presented to the UN but kept out of the public eye.

The only possible road back from that is to blame it on someone else. Turkey's Erdogan would be the best choice as he's made himself an enemy of everyone, including the Saudis. Don't be surprised if Greece joins with Armenia and both get the backing of the US against soon-to-be-ex-NATO-member Turkey.

LEEPERMAX , 8 minutes ago

American Thinker

WILL THE TRUTH ABOUT THE RUSSIA HOAX FINALLY EMERGE?

LEEPERMAX , 13 minutes ago

The Federalist

INTEL SOURCES: CIA DIRECTOR GINA HASPEL BANKING ON TRUMP LOSS TO KEEP RUSSIAGATE DOCUMENTS HIDDEN

[Oct 06, 2020] What's at stake in the Armenia-Azerbaijan chessboard by Pepe Escobar

Oct 06, 2020 | www.unz.com

Yevardian , says: October 2, 2020 at 1:23 am GMT

And I suspect that Azerbaijan will do no harm to the Armenian civilians that stay. They'll be model liberators. And they'll take time to bring back Azerbaijani civilians (refugees/IDPs) to their homes, especially in areas that would become mixed as a result of return."

I never read such rubbish in my life.

AJ , says: October 2, 2020 at 3:02 am GMT
@Yevardian

Agreed, this is rubbish. "Mr. C" – assuming someone like this even exists, is either terribly misinformed or an outright liar. Basically, if we follow Escobar's logic, Armenian's are making a mistake by not agreeing to surrender their lives to the peace loving and rather humanistic dictatorship of Azerbaijan. While he touches on some relevant points, overall, Escobar has not done his homework and has come up with quite a bit of drivel.

Ann Nonny Mouse , says: Website October 2, 2020 at 3:39 am GMT

Pepe, you didn't mention the Armenian Genocide, the Greek Genocide, the Assyrian Genocide, all perpetrated by Turkey.

Why not? Would the Azeris, all Turks, be different? You say the Azeris if they won, Turks, would treat the Armenian population nicely. Huh?

I remember from Runciman's book on the First Crusade that the Turks had already taken over much of Anatolia but he seems to mention Armenians at every turn (from memory -- don't have the book handy).

My impression is that before the Genocide the Armenians were all over Anatolia. There was a narrow coastal strip at the western end that was historically part of Greece, and many different peoples of Asia Minor are mentioned in the NT, but they arguably were all Armenians, making the Armenians the indigenous people of Anatolia.

How is it that Turkey was allowed to keep part of Europe after WWI when they were losers? And did they keep faith? Is the current St Sophia turmoil the norm of Turkish good faith?

Time for all the Turks to get out of Anatolia, give it back to Armenia, and head for Azerbigan.

Aking , says: October 2, 2020 at 5:23 am GMT

Good article. What a web of " frenemies"

Anon [166] Disclaimer , says: October 2, 2020 at 6:00 am GMT
@Yevardian having been disciplined for some years now is, once again, at the throat of the west. Europe spent millions of lives and huge resources throwing the Moors out last time. If they don't take a stand and support Armenia they may very well have to do it again. As far as the mythical Mr C is concerned he comes across, to me, as yet another apologist for the Religion of Peace. Obviously cucked NATO will not help Armenia, they have neither the intestinal fortitude nor the will, so it will be left to Russia and the Visigrad nations, in the mean time Turkey is attempting to take Greek territory, Syrian territory, Libyan territory and anything else that it can get it's mitts on and the West does absolutely nothing. This will not end well.
true.enough , says: October 2, 2020 at 7:20 am GMT

I found this piece difficult to read: lots of data and suppositions scattered about.

Ankara, oh Ankara! Erdogan is overstretched, that's a fact.

Wielgus , says: October 2, 2020 at 7:26 am GMT
@Yevardian

I think few Armenian civilians will take the chance but I very much doubt Azerbaijanis will be "model liberators". The new Azerbaijani state was born from the Sumgait and Baku pogroms. I also don't think they will delay in moving Azeris into areas formerly inhabited by Armenians – their role model Erdoğan has been trying to change facts on the ground by moving ethnic Turks into Kurdish areas in his own country.

Tommy Thompson , says: October 2, 2020 at 10:15 am GMT
@Ann Nonny Mouse endeavor, even if they were the majority, though most accounts say they were 40%.

I would strongly urge the Armenians to get off their nationalist high horse and solve the problem diplomatically and learn to live with their neighbors. Super nationalism is a dangerous and fake mantra that usually leads to disaster. My understanding was that the Azeris and Armenians always got along before this debacle. They should try to work out things and get back to a their original multi-cultural paradigm, that is living side by side instead of fighting and dying over territory and national flags. Live is short and when we pass to the other side you dont carry your flag with you.

Rahan , says: October 2, 2020 at 11:48 am GMT

The Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh declared independence in 1991: but that was not recognized by the "international community"

Just to throw in quickly that if Kosovo is "recognized", then bleeding Karabakh should also long since have been recognized. Especially since the Armenians have an actual holocaust in their 20th century past.

reezy , says: October 2, 2020 at 2:43 pm GMT
@Anon

I believe that it was Winston Churchill who said that the Turk was either at your feet or at your throat

Actually he said that about the Germans. Though it sounds like one of those patronizing aphorisms that can easily apply to anyone.

Lin , says: October 2, 2020 at 3:29 pm GMT

Sabre dance–A famous piece of Armenian music composed by Khachaturian

https://www.youtube.com/embed/aH2Gpdr-WrA?feature=oembed

Aking , says: October 2, 2020 at 3:35 pm GMT
@Rahan

So, seems like the way to get sympathy to rob territory is to make full use of any "genocide" one had suffered as excuse . worked very well ( in fact, spectacularly well) so faR with the Chosen ones .

Showmethereal , says: October 2, 2020 at 5:19 pm GMT

Well i admittedly dont know enough about the situation to try to critique this piece as some of the other comments on here But i am skeptical about Armenia and their stated intent. If it is reallly about protecting an ethnic group – then why not offer them citizenship to move into your territory??? That would lead me to believe it is more about land and resources

Showmethereal , says: October 2, 2020 at 5:23 pm GMT
@true.enough

Yeah i dont know the nitty gritty in this conflict – but i do agree Edrogan seems to be biting off more than he can chew He has too many pots on the fire it seems. Kurds – Qatar/Saudis – Libya – Syria – Greece – Cyprus – and now this..?

Derer , says: October 2, 2020 at 5:33 pm GMT

Aside from refusing to participate against their Muslim cousins (Afghanistan, Libya), Turkey is using NATO doctrine quite effectively. It is a useful bullet prove vest for Erdogan. The Brussels morons will be sorry for not expelling Turkey from their military club long time ago.

SZ , says: October 2, 2020 at 5:37 pm GMT
@Ann Nonny Mouse driven to the Syrian desert AFTER some of them had aligned with the Russians who were about to invade eastern Anatolia in 1915. Similarly, most of Crimean Tatars were expelled from Crimea AFTER some of them had aligned with the invading Germans in 1941. As another comparison, American-Japanese living at the Pacific coast were banished to camps in the interior AFTER the Japanese army had attacked Pearl Harbor and not before.
When a group of people kill or drive out another group it's usually not for the fun of it but rather due to necessities of survival, whatever evil that might require at that particular time depending on the particular circumstances.
Surprised , says: October 2, 2020 at 5:50 pm GMT

It would be interesting to read a scholarly exposition on what the USSR and governments in Eastern Europe proper did or did not do to educate people away from their ancient hatreds, and why whatever they did do appears not to have been particularly successful. Or was it mostly successful and the hatreds were much more intense before 1917?

Tommy Thompson , says: October 2, 2020 at 8:04 pm GMT
@SZ

The ethnic cleansing of the Armenians was pretty bloody and barbaric and was meant as a public spectacle for reasons that are argued about till today.

It was well recorded by the inhabitants of Syria.

Uprising against your rulers does not give the rulers right to carry out genocide or ethnic cleansing in any case.

Anonymous [334] Disclaimer , says: October 3, 2020 at 2:52 am GMT

The entire Jewish American lobby and Israel are on Azerbaijan's side and anti-Armenian, just as when they were working with Turkey to deny the Armenian genocide.

Israel has also sold billions of dollars of weapons to Azerbaijan which the latter is using against Armenians. Israel gets oil from Azerbaijan

Of course, Azerbaijan and Turkey have imported jihadists from Syria and Libya to fight Christian Armenians now.

Apparently, Pepe, you and the Jewish lobby, Israel, Turkey, and the jihadists are on the same side.

Congratulations.

P.S. It would take a hundred pages to list all the factual errors you made. For example, Armenians were still the clear majority in Artsakh/Karabagh in 1988 and 1991. Armenians there had been grossly mistreated by Azerbaijan for decades.

The fighting occurred in the late 1980s only because Azerbaijan, backed by the Russian military, killed and harrassed Armenians. The Azeris also committed massacres of Armenians who were living in Baku and Sumgait in the late 1980s.

Stalin also placed Nakhichevan, an Armenian territory, inside Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan kicked out every Armenian from Nakhichevan. Azerbaijan was doing that to Artsakh/Karabagh too.

No wonder Artsakh voted to be independent from Azerbaijan, something you don't want to understand.
Better luck next time trying to fool readers, Pepe.

Felix Keverich , says: October 3, 2020 at 6:46 am GMT

The key fact remains that as long as Armenia proper is not attacked by Azerbaijan, Russia will not apply the CSTO treaty and step in. Erdogan knows this is his red line. Moscow has all it takes to put him in serious trouble – as in shutting off gas supplies to Turkey.

Russia isn't going to shut off gas to Turkey. Russia never does that (shutting off gas). It's a Western canard.

Russia could, however, impose a no-fly-zone over Georgia, effectively blocking resupply and reinforcements to Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan is almost completely surrounded by Russian allies and bases. They rely on Georgia for military transit.

Druid , says: October 3, 2020 at 7:29 am GMT
@Ann Nonny Mouse

Ignorant post. Armenian nationalist were active in Russia prior to ww1, then supported Russian entrance into Turkish territory because they shared a religion. They stabbed the ottomans , of which they were a big part, in the back. The young Turks , who were actually donmeh jews, had them marched off to Syria and lebanon, etc, causing many deaths! The Armenian is still causing trouble for the Turks. They sided with the mongols in their battles against the Muslims, along wit the Georgians, repeatedly. More to a small story

anon [154] Disclaimer , says: October 3, 2020 at 11:51 pm GMT

What's going to happen to USA? The poverty and racial intolerance ,both seem to be undermining the stability and the ideological integrity of the country . I see many states emerging from the body of America.But the problems will not be resolved . It might just like like Caucasian territory or Balkan .

Anonymous [231] Disclaimer , says: October 4, 2020 at 3:25 am GMT
@Yevardian

Pepe appears to be on the side of Azerbaijan, and thus also on the side of Turkey, Israel, the Jewish lobby, and jihadists.

Nice company.

vot tak , says: October 4, 2020 at 11:58 pm GMT

Reading this, my suspicion is this "mr. c" is part of the western disinformation machine, probably operating for the israelis.

Semiogogue , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:47 am GMT

1. BTC is described as 'bypassing Iran'. One could easily argue it also bypasses *Russia* . Perhaps that's what made it necessary for Soros & others to peel Georgia off from Russian control back in the day? Look how Russia responded by recapturing the Georgian Military Highway (South Ossetia).

2. Look in general at how Russia is willing to give up huge areas of territory so long as she keeps key strategic points of control: South Ossetia, Crimea, Transnistria, Abkhazia and Armenia. Smell the coffee.

3. 2. 'Mr. C' is quick to mention Baku/Ankara joint exercises in August, but fails to mention Kavkas 2020 exercises led by Russia. Uh duh.

4. 'Mr. C' seems to ignore the fact that Armenia couldn't have taken that territory in first place, or kept it, w/out Russian assistance. And idea 'Russia can do nothing' is absurd. As is the idea that Russia can't supply Armenia because there's no land connection. Did the allies have any problem keeping West Berlin supplied by air? Of course not. All nonsense.

5. The idea that there is a 'Russia/Turkey' strategic partnership is also silly. Where is this partnership? Turkey buying S-400s? So what? Are they in partnership in Syria? In Libya? No. So why would they be in N-K?

6. Weird. No mention of China and it's growing relationship with Turkey. This probably tells you all you need to know about the author. Unless of course the author is just a fool, which is also possible.

Jivinski , says: October 5, 2020 at 4:04 am GMT

"Yet even before the collapse the Azerbaijani Army and Armenian independentists were already at war (1988-1994), which yielded a grim balance of 30,000 dead and roughly a million wounded."

This is a wounded-to-killed ratio of thirty-three to one. Doesn't make sense.

Majority of One , says: October 5, 2020 at 4:35 am GMT

Were Russia to be as devious and underhanded as the puppet regime in the Di$trict of Corruption, they would arrange for an overthrow of the present NATO/EU/U$ regime in Yerevan. With those bastards out of the way and Armenia no longer playing double jeopardy, it might be possible for a new Orthodox oriented Armenian government to come to some sort of arrangement with Baku.

At the same time, perhaps Syrian spetsnaz units could practice some infiltration tactics into Turkish semi-occupied "greater" Idlib and Ghurka style, behead a few Turkish officers running the show there.

"Sultan" Erdogan is playing loose and wild with his shattering economy and massive military. It is high time he was given a black-eye–one that would cause him to lose face among his own countrymen.

Mactoul , says: October 5, 2020 at 5:08 am GMT
@SZ

How many of the Japanese-American deportees died as consequence of deportation vs how many Armenians that died as consequence of their deportation.

It is not deportation that is alleged to be the Turkish crime but genocide. Please keep it mind.

Yukon Jack , says: October 5, 2020 at 5:16 am GMT

This is my educated guess, the Anglo-Zionists led by Rothschild and Netanayahu destablize the oil in the Middle East to keep their prices of oil in USD above 100 $/barrel

They have also blown up oil derricks in the North Sea, shut down Iranian and Iraq and Syria oil production. The game is clear, low oil prices are being met with wiping out the competition.

And causing hell in Iran and Venezueala. Back in 1954 Operation Ajax took out Mossadeq and installed the Shah – puppet of big oil. Before it was BP it was the Persian Gulf Oil Co. BP is owned mostly by the crown.

Trump's secretary of state was Rex Tillerson CEO Exxon just like GW Bush picked Condoleeza Rice CEO Chevron to be his national security advisor.

The Israel angle is to get Iran and to goad Russia into war with the USA, the eventually goal is that USA-Russia-China are reduced while Jews rule the world from Jerusalem.

How much you wanna bet Bibi Satanyahu has a hand in this war? And Evangelical Christians will support Israel even if this war kills lots of Armenian Christians just like in Syria.

Since this war in on Russia's doorstep Putin an Lavrov will try negotiations first then what will they do next. Putin has vowed the war will never come to Russia which means Russia will enter the theater on the anti-Zionist side.

Have you noticed every state within a few hundred miles of Israel is being torched and the natives driven out?

Ghali , says: October 5, 2020 at 6:17 am GMT

Back again to Pepe Escobar's distortions of reality. Nagorno-Karabakh is an Armenian-occupied Azerbaijani territory. In fact, no country in the world recognises it as an "Independent" as Escobar likes to mislead us. Armenia should do the right thing and withdraw its forces, including foreign militants from there. Like Israel, Armenia is playing the role of a victim of a "holocaust".

GMC , says: October 5, 2020 at 7:20 am GMT

Considering that the 2nd largest US/NWO Embassy in the World is in Armenia – a country of 2.9 million people, and that the new President was put in power by the West – the end game is to continue to surround Russia, screw up the New Silk Road, and be at Iran's back door too. As said before , the domestic USA can totally look like the USSR in the 90s, but the NWO Foreign policy money is 100% – guaranteed. What do all those thousands of workers in that huge Embassy compound do ?

GMC , says: October 5, 2020 at 7:30 am GMT
@Tommy Thompson

Actually, once the Armenians were genocided , the Jewish bankers were the big shots left in Turkey. H Morgenthau, our Turkish ambassador along with being jewish himself, wrote about it in his reports. The Game hasn't changed much – it stays the same. Thanks.

J , says: October 5, 2020 at 7:44 am GMT

About a third of Iran's population is Azeri. Should they develop interest in the conflict, Iran may become involved. That would align Turkey and Iran vs Russia. That would be something.

ARemo , says: October 5, 2020 at 8:48 am GMT
@Yevardian

Damn right. We already have experience what happens when Turks get control of Christian Armenians – systematic gang rapes and death marches are the rule of the day. Turks are animals and letting them control any portion of Armenia is basically turning that place into a concentration camp.

Ming Shih-tsung , says: October 5, 2020 at 10:58 am GMT
@Yevardian

"Mr. C" probably stands for Cemal, given how biased he is.

anon [229] Disclaimer , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:01 pm GMT
@Yukon Jack Pahlavi ruled post 1953.

Fact: 1979 was the year that "big oil" LEGAL contracts were to expire and the "puppet" Shah had threatened as early as 1973 (when he was instrumental in making OPEC a powerful entity) that in 1979 Iran "would sell Iranian Oil to any buyer, at market prices".

Fact: Iran, in 1978 produced 6 million barrels per day. It has never been permitted to reach those levels again.

Fact: Chinese, Indian, Syrian, Venezuelan, and God knows who else, all projects of the Global Cabal have been getting Iranian Oil (under their engineered boxing of Iranian nation) at levels that very likely are equal if not LOWER than the terms the Qajar idiots gave the insatiablely greedy and slimey English.

Alfred , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:05 pm GMT
@Ann Nonny Mouse Genocide, all perpetrated by Turkey.

And you did not mention that the only quarters of Smyrna/Izmir that were not torched in a fire in 1922 were the Jewish and Turkish quarters – what a surprise! An antecedent to 9/11. Here is the Jewpedia hiding the real story – as usual.

The Armenian and Greek quarters were destroyed and the Jews got a monopoly on the commerce. Done deal!

Great fire of Smyrna

Wielgus , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:09 pm GMT
@GMC

If the "colour revolution" assumptions were in force, there would be a host of denunciations of Azerbaijan and Turkey (the latter perhaps the real prime mover in this) by the USA and EU etc. There aren't. The USA and EU may even tacitly support the Azerbaijanis, perhaps they hope the Russians and Iranians will become entangled in this affair and so forth.

Ugetit , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:14 pm GMT
@vot tak

my suspicion is this "mr. c" is part of the western disinformation machine, probably operating for the israelis.

While I know nothing about the situation, after reading the article and the mostly excellent comments, I suspect your suspicion is correct.

Alfred , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:38 pm GMT

I have a suggestion.

How about swapping Nagorno-Karabakh for North Cyprus. I am sure the Greeks would be very happy to live with the Armenians. But the Sultan's dreams of owning the Eastern Mediterranean would come to naught.

anon [137] Disclaimer , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:45 pm GMT
@Lin

I've always associated that piece with the circus not knowing the title or its origin.

Stebbing Heuer , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:50 pm GMT
@Anonymous

Stalin did nasty things like that to keep the republics feuding with each other rather than pushing back against Moscow. The mixed-up borders of the 'stans, further east, are testament to this. Fergana Valley?

Divide and rule. Still costing lives in pointless wars almost 100 years later.

Дима Трамп , says: October 5, 2020 at 1:07 pm GMT

At stake is the very existence of the Armenian people. Turkey is trying to finish what remains of them after the genocide last century. Both Erdoghan and Aliev have stated, that they want a "final solution" to the "Armenian problem".

It's an existential battle for the Armenians.

Дима Трамп , says: October 5, 2020 at 1:09 pm GMT
@Yevardian

We all know what they did to the Armenians in 1915.

Дима Трамп , says: October 5, 2020 at 1:11 pm GMT
@Alfred

Exactly. The history of Turkey since 1880-s is full of ethnic cleansings and genocides of the non-muslim people such as Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians.

MLK , says: October 5, 2020 at 1:16 pm GMT

My thanks to Escobar for taking on a subject rather obviously not susceptible to 2,700 word essays, along with attention worthy links.

His biases are not my own but he's thoughtful and certainly doesn't hide them.

In this and so many other incidents we can see how thoroughly Trump has moved the American ship of state despite the relentless efforts of foreign and domestic resistance to neutralize America First and destroy him.

It's really quite something the way Obama's presidency in all its disastrous fullness has been memory-holed. The defense of it being that it merely extended Bush's world-historical incompetence and malefactions.

Could you have turned US unipolarity following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact into a "moment" if you tried? I couldn't.

You will be way ahead of most everyone if you get your mind around that and the geopolitical sad story that is CCP China winning the post-Cold War quarter-century hands down.

We inevitably come back to the point that the whole drama can be interpreted from the perspective of a NATO geopolitical hit against Russia – according to quite a few analyses circulating at the Duma.

Ukraine is an absolute black hole. There's the Belarus impasse. Covid-19. The Navalny circus. The "threat" to Nord Stream-2.

To pull Russia back into the Armenia-Azerbaijan drama means turning Moscow's attention towards the Caucasus . . .

I confess that I get no end of enjoyment over bellyaching on behalf of those powers the Obama administration was turning the world over to. Nord Stream II was merely the down payment on Russia's assistance/acquiescence in throwing the electron to Hillary, with the sky the limit for China, Russia and Iran once Democrats and their foreign allies had neutralized free and fair elections.

Now all of these powers must deal with a real POTUS who asks "What have you done for the US lately?"

The USG and Russia have cooperated where geopolitical interests align. More will follow once Trump takes the oath again. As I've explained previously, despite its high-risk position in the Resistance matrix, Russia/Putin have (unsurprisingly, to me) acted skillfully and with circumspection.

The same cannot be said for Iran. Nor China, particularly since the end of last year.

Ashino Wolf Sushanti , says: October 5, 2020 at 1:27 pm GMT

https://www.putin-today.ru/archives/109463
https://vz.ru
Михаил Мошкин

Why Russia needs Azerbaijan !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The aggravation of the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh has raised a number of questions. In particular, why Moscow is in no hurry to stand up for Armenia and why it does not sharply criticize
Azerbaijan. The answer is that Moscow and Baku have very close relations, and not only economic relations. So what is the value and irreplaceability of Azerbaijan for Russia?

[MORE]
Z-man , says: October 5, 2020 at 1:52 pm GMT

Border and population changes are in order. A quarter of N-K goes back to Azerbaijan and the rest closer to Armenia proper plus the capital city goes to Armenia with a 50 mile wide band connecting it with the rest of Armenia. The Azeris get the rest of their lands now occupied by the Armenians. Will it happen? Probably not, just look at Kosovo..

God's Fool , says: October 5, 2020 at 2:05 pm GMT

There is a province between Ngorno Karabakh and Armenia proper of roughly of the same size belonging to Azerbaijan, so why not just exchange it with each other to avoid further conflict and bloodshed?

Дима Трамп , says: October 5, 2020 at 2:57 pm GMT
@God's Fool

There is no guarantee that Turkey will not try to then eliminate whatever remains of Armenia.

Remember, Turkey genocided Armenians and wiped out close to 80% of them in 1915 through 1922. Armenian populated areas stretched from what is now Armenia until the shores of Eastern Mediterranean. The only thing that is left of it is Kessab in modern day Syria.

Majority of One , says: October 5, 2020 at 3:14 pm GMT
@Ghali nial borders are fake, false and fraudulent, whether in Asia or Africa. Over time, justice will prevail and borders will reflect the ethno-national composition of its long-term inhabitants.

That said, the current regime in Yerevan needs to be overthrown, as it was established in conjunction with the interests of the Cabal/Nato and their various puppet regimes. Armenia is the oldest Orthodox Christian nation in the world and was severely genocided by the Donmeh covert Jewish Masons who called themselves the "Young Turks" who were led by Enver Pasha.

By the way, who are you, Ghali? Do you have a dog in the fight? Are you connected with an intel agency?

anaccount , says: October 5, 2020 at 3:21 pm GMT

Excellent article, normally I pass over Pepe for the naughty articles on Unz but I might have to take another look.

My only critique is that the article feels pro-Azeri but that's balanced with an informative description how this started in July, including an accurate appraisal of Turkish behavior.

I'm not Azeri or Armenian so I didn't have a dog in this fight until I noticed Israel's support for Azerbaijan. It's nothing personal, I have only one hate.

Shaman911 , says: October 5, 2020 at 3:27 pm GMT

Jewish Bankers shifting profits to other Jewish bankers. Funding all sides and profiting from the mass graves again. 5000 years and nothing has changed.

GMC , says: October 5, 2020 at 3:36 pm GMT
@Wielgus

The Turks are the US Army in this – with their proxy armies sent to help the Azerbaijanis, just like the US Army /Israelis and their proxies Isis, al Nusra, al Qaeda etc. in Syria. The US and their 6000 employees at the Embassy, don't have to say anything – they back both sides – just like the Zionists do – in the US political parties. Things don't change , Tactics don't change. Thanks.

A.R. , says: October 5, 2020 at 4:30 pm GMT
@Majority of One

You are asking him if he has a dog in this fight? What about yourself? You very clearly have a dog in this fight yourself, haven`t you?
Try to cut down on the hypocrasy, why don`t you, and at the same time maybe moderate your "holier than thou" attitude.

[Oct 05, 2020] Obviously the large multinational corporations meekly follow the edict of national-security bureaucrats even as it harms their bottom line.

Oct 05, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

jay , Oct 4 2020 18:01 utc | 20

Bow to the imperial overlord:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-huawei/japans-sony-and-kioxia-seeking-u-s-approval-to-supply-to-huawei-nikkei-idUSKBN26P00T

Obviously the large multinational corporations are not in fact in charge, and will meekly follow the edict of national-security bureaucrats even as it harms their bottom line.

[Oct 05, 2020] What's at stake in the Armenia-Azerbaijan chessboard

Notable quotes:
"... "the EU and Russia find common cause to limit Azerbaijani gains (in large part because Erdogan is no one's favorite guy, not just because of this but because of the Eastern Med, Syria, Libya)." ..."
"... "Iran favors Armenia, which is counter-intuitive at first sight. So the Iranians may help the Russians out (funneling supplies), but on the other hand they have a good relationship with Turkey, especially in the oil and gas smuggling business. And if they get too overt in their support, Trump has a casus belli to get involved and the Europeans may not like to end up on the same side as the Russians and the Iranians. It just looks bad. And the Europeans hate to look bad." ..."
Oct 05, 2020 | unz.com

It's important to remember that there was no "Azerbaijan" nation-state until the early 1920s. Historically, Azerbaijan is a territory in northern Iran. Azeris are very well integrated within the Islamic Republic. So the Republic of Azerbaijan actually borrowed its name from their Iranian neighbors. In ancient history, the territory of the new 20 th century republic was known as Atropatene, and Aturpakatan before the advent of Islam.

How the equation changed

Baku's main argument is that Armenia is blocking a contiguous Azerbaijani nation, as a look in the map shows us that southwest Azerbaijan is de facto split all the way to the Iranian border.

And that plunges us necessarily into deep background. To clarify matters, there could not be a more reliable guide than a top Caucasus think tank expert who shared his analysis with me by email, but is insistent on "no attribution". Let's call him Mr. C.

Mr. C notes that, "for decades, the equation remained the same and the variables in the equation remained the same, more or less. This was the case notwithstanding the fact that Armenia is an unstable democracy in transition and Azerbaijan had much more continuity at the top."

We should all be aware that "Azerbaijan lost territory right at the beginning of the restoration of its statehood, when it was basically a failed state run by armchair nationalist amateurs [before Heydar Aliyev, Ilham's father, came to power]. And Armenia was a mess, too but less so when you take into consideration that it had strong Russian support and Azerbaijan had no one. Back in the day, Turkey was still a secular state with a military that looked West and took its NATO membership seriously. Since then, Azerbaijan has built up its economy and increased its population. So it kept getting stronger. But its military was still underperforming."

That slowly started to change in 2020: "Basically, in the past few months you've seen incremental increases in the intensity of near daily ceasefire violations (the near-daily violations are nothing new: they've been going on for years). So this blew up in July and there was a shooting war for a few days. Then everyone calmed down again."

All this time, something important was developing in the background: Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who came to power in May 2018, and Aliyev started to talk: "The Azerbaijani side thought this indicated Armenia was ready for compromise (this all started when Armenia had a sort of revolution, with the new PM coming in with a popular mandate to clean house domestically). For whatever reason, it ended up not happening."

What happened in fact was the July shooting war.

Don't forget Pipelineistan

Armenian PM Pashinyan could be described as a liberal globalist. The majority of his political team is pro-NATO. Pashinyan went all guns blazing against former Armenian President (1998- 2008) Robert Kocharian, who before that happened to be, crucially, the de facto President of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Kocharian, who spent years in Russia and is close to President Putin, was charged with a nebulous attempt at "overthrowing the constitutional order". Pashinyan tried to land him in jail. But even more crucial is the fact that Pashinyan refused to follow a plan elaborated by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to finally settle the Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh mess.

In the current fog of war, things are even messier. Mr. C stresses two points: "First, Armenia asked for CSTO protection and got bitch slapped, hard and in public; second, Armenia threatened to bomb the oil and gas pipelines in Azerbaijan (there are several, they all run parallel, and they supply not just Georgia and Turkey but now the Balkans and Italy). With regards to the latter, Azerbaijan basically said: if you do that, we'll bomb your nuclear reactor."

The Pipelineistan angle is indeed crucial: for years I have followed on Asia Times these myriad, interlocking oil and gas soap operas, especially the BTC (Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan), conceived by Zbigniew Brzezinski to bypass Iran. I was even "arrested" by a BP 4X4 when I was tracking the pipeline on a parallel side road out of the massive Sangachal terminal: that proved British Petroleum was in practice the real boss, not the Azerbaijani government.

In sum, now we have reached the point where, according to Mr. C,

"Armenia's saber rattling got more aggressive." Reasons, on the Armenian side, seem to be mostly domestic: terrible handling of Covid-19 (in contrast to Azerbaijan), and the dire state of the economy. So, says Mr. C, we came to a toxic concourse of circumstances: Armenia deflected from its problems by being tough on Azerbaijan, while Azerbaijan just had had enough.

It's always about Turkey

Anyway one looks at the Armenia-Azerbaijan drama, the key destabilizing factor is now Turkey.

Mr. C notes how, "throughout the summer, the quality of the Turkish-Azerbaijani military exercises increased (both prior to July events and subsequently). The Azerbaijani military got a lot better. Also, since the fourth quarter of 2019 the President of Azerbaijan has been getting rid of the (perceived) pro-Russian elements in positions of power." See, for instance, here .

There's no way to confirm it either with Moscow or Ankara, but Mr. C advances what President Erdogan may have told the Russians: "We'll go into Armenia directly if a) Azerbaijan starts to lose, b) Russia goes in or accepts CSTO to be invoked or something along those lines, or c) Armenia goes after the pipelines. All are reasonable red lines for the Turks, especially when you factor in the fact that they don't like the Armenians very much and that they consider the Azerbaijanis brothers."

It's crucial to remember that in August, Baku and Ankara held two weeks of joint air and land military exercises. Baku has bought advanced drones from both Turkey and Israel. There's no smokin' gun, at least not yet, but Ankara may have hired up to 4,000 Salafi-jihadis in Syria to fight -- wait for it -- in favor of Shi'ite-majority Azerbaijan, proving once again that "jihadism" is all about making a quick buck.

The United Armenian Information Center, as well as the Kurdish Afrin Post, have stated that Ankara opened two recruitment centers -- in Afrin schools -- for mercenaries. Apparently this has been a quite popular move because Ankara slashed salaries for Syrian mercenaries shipped to Libya.

There's an extra angle that is deeply worrying not only for Russia but also for Central Asia. According to the former Foreign Minister of Nagorno-Karabakh, Ambassador Extraordinary Arman Melikyan, mercenaries using Azeri IDs issued in Baku may be able to infiltrate Dagestan and Chechnya and, via the Caspian, reach Atyrau in Kazakhstan, from where they can easily reach Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

That's the ultimate nightmare of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) -- shared by Russia, China and the Central Asian "stans": a jihadi land -- and (Caspian) sea -- bridge from the Caucasus all the way to Central Asia, and even Xinjiang.

What's the point of this war?

So what happens next? A nearly insurmountable impasse, as Mr. C outlines it:

1. "The peace talks are going nowhere because Armenia is refusing to budge (to withdraw from occupying Nagorno-Karabakh plus 7 surrounding regions in phases or all at once, with the usual guarantees for civilians, even settlers -- note that when they went in in the early 1990s they cleansed those lands of literally all Azerbaijanis, something like between 700,000 and 1 million people)."

2. Aliyev was under the impression that Pashinyan "was willing to compromise and began preparing his people and then looked like someone with egg on his face when it didn't happen."

3. "Turkey has made it crystal clear it will support Azerbaijan unconditionally, and has matched those words with deeds."

4. "In such circumstances, Russia got outplayed -- in the sense that they had been able to play off Armenia against Azerbaijan and vice versa, quite successfully, helping to mediate talks that went nowhere, preserving the status quo that effectively favored Armenia."

And that brings us to the crucial question. What's the point of this war?

Mr. C: "It is either to conquer as much as possible before the "international community" [in this case, the UNSC] calls for / demands a ceasefire or to do so as an impetus for re-starting talks that actually lead to progress. In either scenario, Azerbaijan will end up with gains and Armenia with losses. How much and under what circumstances (the status and question of Nagorno-Karabakh is distinct from the status and question of the Armenian occupied territories around Nagorno-Karabakh) is unknown: i.e. on the field of battle or the negotiating table or a combo of both. However this turns out, at a minimum Azerbaijan will get to keep what it liberated in battle. This will be the new starting point. And I suspect that Azerbaijan will do no harm to the Armenian civilians that stay. They'll be model liberators. And they'll take time to bring back Azerbaijani civilians (refugees/IDPs) to their homes, especially in areas that would become mixed as a result of return."

So what can Moscow do under these circumstances? Not much,

"except to go into Azerbaijan proper, which they won't do (there's no land border between Russia and Armenia; so although Russia has a military base in Armenia with one or more thousand troops, they can't just supply Armenia with guns and troops at will, given the geography)."

Crucially, Moscow privileges the strategic partnership with Armenia -- which is a member of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) -- while meticulously monitoring each and every NATO-member Turkey's movement: after all, they are already in opposing sides in both Libya and Syria.

So, to put it mildly, Moscow is walking on a geopolitical razor's edge. Russia needs to exercise restraint and invest in a carefully calibrated balancing act between Armenia and Azerbaijan; must preserve the Russia-Turkey strategic partnership; and must be alert to all, possible US Divide and Rule tactics.

Inside Erdogan's war

So in the end this would be yet another Erdogan war?

The inescapable Follow the Money analysis would tells us, yes. The Turkish economy is an absolute mess, with high inflation and a depreciating currency. Baku has a wealth of oil-gas funds that could become readily available -- adding to Ankara's dream of turning Turkey also into an energy supplier.

Mr. C adds that anchoring Turkey in Azerbaijan would lead to "the creation of full-fledged Turkish military bases and the inclusion of Azerbaijan in the Turkish orbit of influence (the "two countries -- one nation" thesis, in which Turkey assumes supremacy) within the framework of neo-Ottomanism and Turkey's leadership in the Turkic-speaking world."

Add to it the all-important NATO angle. Mr. C essentially sees it as Erdogan, enabled by Washington, about to make a NATO push to the east while establishing that immensely dangerous jihadi channel into Russia: "This is no local adventure by Erdogan. I understand that Azerbaijan is largely Shi'ite Islam and that will complicate things but not render his adventure impossible."

This totally ties in with a notorious RAND report that explicitly details how "the United States could try to induce Armenia to break with Russia" and "encourage Armenia to move fully into the NATO orbit."

It's beyond obvious that Moscow is observing all these variables with extreme care. That is reflected, for instance, in how irrepressible Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, earlier this week, has packaged a very serious diplomatic warning: "The downing of an Armenian SU-25 by a Turkish F-16, as claimed by the Ministry of Defense in Armenia, seems to complicate the situation, as Moscow, based on the Tashkent treaty, is obligated to offer military assistance to Armenia".

It's no wonder both Baku and Yerevan got the message and are firmly denying anything happened.

The key fact remains that as long as Armenia proper is not attacked by Azerbaijan, Russia will not apply the CSTO treaty and step in. Erdogan knows this is his red line. Moscow has all it takes to put him in serious trouble -- as in shutting off gas supplies to Turkey. Moscow, meanwhile, will keep helping Yerevan with intel and hardware -- flown in from Iran. Diplomacy rules -- and the ultimate target is yet another ceasefire.

Pulling Russia back in

Mr. C advances the strong possibility -- and I have heard echoes from Brussels -- that

"the EU and Russia find common cause to limit Azerbaijani gains (in large part because Erdogan is no one's favorite guy, not just because of this but because of the Eastern Med, Syria, Libya)."

That brings to the forefront the renewed importance of the UNSC in imposing a ceasefire. Washington's role at the moment is quite intriguing. Of course, Trump has more important things to do at the moment. Moreover, the Armenian diaspora in the US swings drastically pro-Democrat.

Then, to round it all up, there's the all-important Iran-Armenia relationship. Here is a forceful attempt to put it in perspective.

As Mr. C stresses, "Iran favors Armenia, which is counter-intuitive at first sight. So the Iranians may help the Russians out (funneling supplies), but on the other hand they have a good relationship with Turkey, especially in the oil and gas smuggling business. And if they get too overt in their support, Trump has a casus belli to get involved and the Europeans may not like to end up on the same side as the Russians and the Iranians. It just looks bad. And the Europeans hate to look bad."

We inevitably come back to the point that the whole drama can be interpreted from the perspective of a NATO geopolitical hit against Russia -- according to quite a few analyses circulating at the Duma.

Ukraine is an absolute black hole. There's the Belarus impasse. Covid-19. The Navalny circus. The "threat" to Nord Stream-2.

To pull Russia back into the Armenia-Azerbaijan drama means turning Moscow's attention towards the Caucasus so there's more Turkish freedom of action in other theaters -- in the Eastern Mediterranean versus Greece, in Syria, in Libya. Ankara -- foolishly -- is engaged in simultaneous wars on several fronts, and with virtually no allies.

What this means is that even more than NATO, monopolizing Russia's attention in the Caucasus most of all may be profitable for Erdogan himself. As Mr. C stresses, "in this situation, the Nagorno-Karabakh leverage/'trump card' in the hands of Turkey would be useful for negotiations with Russia."

No question: the neo-Ottoman sultan never sleeps.


Yevardian , says: October 2, 2020 at 1:23 am GMT

And I suspect that Azerbaijan will do no harm to the Armenian civilians that stay. They’ll be model liberators. And they’ll take time to bring back Azerbaijani civilians (refugees/IDPs) to their homes, especially in areas that would become mixed as a result of return.”

I never read such rubbish in my life.

AJ , says: October 2, 2020 at 3:02 am GMT
@Yevardian

Agreed, this is rubbish. “Mr. C” – assuming someone like this even exists, is either terribly misinformed or an outright liar. Basically, if we follow Escobar’s logic, Armenian’s are making a mistake by not agreeing to surrender their lives to the peace loving and rather humanistic dictatorship of Azerbaijan. While he touches on some relevant points, overall, Escobar has not done his homework and has come up with quite a bit of drivel.

Ann Nonny Mouse , says: • Website October 2, 2020 at 3:39 am GMT

Pepe, you didn’t mention the Armenian Genocide, the Greek Genocide, the Assyrian Genocide, all perpetrated by Turkey.

Why not? Would the Azeris, all Turks, be different? You say the Azeris if they won, Turks, would treat the Armenian population nicely. Huh?

I remember from Runciman’s book on the First Crusade that the Turks had already taken over much of Anatolia but he seems to mention Armenians at every turn (from memory—don’t have the book handy).

My impression is that before the Genocide the Armenians were all over Anatolia. There was a narrow coastal strip at the western end that was historically part of Greece, and many different peoples of Asia Minor are mentioned in the NT, but they arguably were all Armenians, making the Armenians the indigenous people of Anatolia.

How is it that Turkey was allowed to keep part of Europe after WWI when they were losers? And did they keep faith? Is the current St Sophia turmoil the norm of Turkish good faith?

Time for all the Turks to get out of Anatolia, give it back to Armenia, and head for Azerbigan.

Aking , says: October 2, 2020 at 5:23 am GMT

Good article. What a web of “ frenemies”…

Anon [166] • Disclaimer , says: October 2, 2020 at 6:00 am GMT
@Yevardian having been disciplined for some years now is, once again, at the throat of the west. Europe spent millions of lives and huge resources throwing the Moors out last time. If they don’t take a stand and support Armenia they may very well have to do it again. As far as the mythical Mr C is concerned he comes across, to me, as yet another apologist for the Religion of Peace. Obviously cucked NATO will not help Armenia, they have neither the intestinal fortitude nor the will, so it will be left to Russia and the Visigrad nations, in the mean time Turkey is attempting to take Greek territory, Syrian territory, Libyan territory and anything else that it can get it’s mitts on and the West does absolutely nothing. This will not end well.
true.enough , says: October 2, 2020 at 7:20 am GMT

I found this piece difficult to read: lots of data and suppositions scattered about.

Ankara, oh Ankara! Erdogan is overstretched, that’s a fact.

Wielgus , says: October 2, 2020 at 7:26 am GMT
@Yevardian

I think few Armenian civilians will take the chance but I very much doubt Azerbaijanis will be “model liberators”. The new Azerbaijani state was born from the Sumgait and Baku pogroms. I also don’t think they will delay in moving Azeris into areas formerly inhabited by Armenians – their role model Erdoğan has been trying to change facts on the ground by moving ethnic Turks into Kurdish areas in his own country.

Tommy Thompson , says: October 2, 2020 at 10:15 am GMT
@Ann Nonny Mouse deavor, even if they were the majority, though most accounts say they were 40%.

I would strongly urge the Armenians to get off their nationalist high horse and solve the problem diplomatically and learn to live with their neighbors. Super nationalism is a dangerous and fake mantra that usually leads to disaster. My understanding was that the Azeris and Armenians always got along before this debacle. They should try to work out things and get back to a their original multi-cultural paradigm, that is living side by side instead of fighting and dying over territory and national flags. Live is short and when we pass to the other side you dont carry your flag with you.

Rahan , says: October 2, 2020 at 11:48 am GMT

The Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh declared independence in 1991: but that was not recognized by the “international community”

Just to throw in quickly that if Kosovo is “recognized”, then bleeding Karabakh should also long since have been recognized. Especially since the Armenians have an actual holocaust in their 20th century past.

reezy , says: October 2, 2020 at 2:43 pm GMT
@Anon

I believe that it was Winston Churchill who said that the Turk was either at your feet or at your throat

Actually he said that about the Germans. Though it sounds like one of those patronizing aphorisms that can easily apply to anyone.

Lin , says: October 2, 2020 at 3:29 pm GMT

Sabre dance–A famous piece of Armenian music composed by Khachaturian

https://www.youtube.com/embed/aH2Gpdr-WrA?feature=oembed

Aking , says: October 2, 2020 at 3:35 pm GMT
@Rahan

So, seems like the way to get sympathy to rob territory is to make full use of any “genocide” one had suffered as excuse…. worked very well ( in fact, spectacularly well) so faR with the Chosen ones….

Showmethereal , says: October 2, 2020 at 5:19 pm GMT

Well i admittedly dont know enough about the situation to try to critique this piece as some of the other comments on here… But i am skeptical about Armenia and their stated intent. If it is reallly about protecting an ethnic group – then why not offer them citizenship to move into your territory??? That would lead me to believe it is more about land and resources…

Showmethereal , says: October 2, 2020 at 5:23 pm GMT
@true.enough

Yeah i dont know the nitty gritty in this conflict – but i do agree Edrogan seems to be biting off more than he can chew… He has too many pots on the fire it seems. Kurds – Qatar/Saudis – Libya – Syria – Greece – Cyprus – and now this..?

Derer , says: October 2, 2020 at 5:33 pm GMT

Aside from refusing to participate against their Muslim cousins (Afghanistan, Libya), Turkey is using NATO doctrine quite effectively. It is a useful bullet prove vest for Erdogan. The Brussels morons will be sorry for not expelling Turkey from their military club long time ago.

SZ , says: October 2, 2020 at 5:37 pm GMT
@Ann Nonny Mouse iven to the Syrian desert AFTER some of them had aligned with the Russians who were about to invade eastern Anatolia in 1915. Similarly, most of Crimean Tatars were expelled from Crimea AFTER some of them had aligned with the invading Germans in 1941. As another comparison, American-Japanese living at the Pacific coast were banished to camps in the interior AFTER the Japanese army had attacked Pearl Harbor and not before.
When a group of people kill or drive out another group it’s usually not for the fun of it but rather due to necessities of survival, whatever evil that might require at that particular time depending on the particular circumstances.
Surprised , says: October 2, 2020 at 5:50 pm GMT

It would be interesting to read a scholarly exposition on what the USSR and governments in Eastern Europe proper did or did not do to educate people away from their ancient hatreds, and why whatever they did do appears not to have been particularly successful. Or was it mostly successful and the hatreds were much more intense before 1917?

Tommy Thompson , says: October 2, 2020 at 8:04 pm GMT
@SZ

The ethnic cleansing of the Armenians was pretty bloody and barbaric and was meant as a public spectacle for reasons that are argued about till today.

It was well recorded by the inhabitants of Syria.

Uprising against your rulers does not give the rulers right to carry out genocide or ethnic cleansing in any case.

Anonymous [334] • Disclaimer , says: October 3, 2020 at 2:52 am GMT

The entire Jewish American lobby and Israel are on Azerbaijan’s side and anti-Armenian, just as when they were working with Turkey to deny the Armenian genocide.

Israel has also sold billions of dollars of weapons to Azerbaijan which the latter is using against Armenians. Israel gets oil from Azerbaijan

Of course, Azerbaijan and Turkey have imported jihadists from Syria and Libya to fight Christian Armenians now.

Apparently, Pepe, you and the Jewish lobby, Israel, Turkey, and the jihadists are on the same side.

Congratulations.

P.S. It would take a hundred pages to list all the factual errors you made. For example, Armenians were still the clear majority in Artsakh/Karabagh in 1988 and 1991. Armenians there had been grossly mistreated by Azerbaijan for decades.

The fighting occurred in the late 1980s only because Azerbaijan, backed by the Russian military, killed and harrassed Armenians. The Azeris also committed massacres of Armenians who were living in Baku and Sumgait in the late 1980s.

Stalin also placed Nakhichevan, an Armenian territory, inside Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan kicked out every Armenian from Nakhichevan. Azerbaijan was doing that to Artsakh/Karabagh too.

No wonder Artsakh voted to be independent from Azerbaijan, something you don’t want to understand.
Better luck next time trying to fool readers, Pepe.

Felix Keverich , says: October 3, 2020 at 6:46 am GMT

The key fact remains that as long as Armenia proper is not attacked by Azerbaijan, Russia will not apply the CSTO treaty and step in. Erdogan knows this is his red line. Moscow has all it takes to put him in serious trouble – as in shutting off gas supplies to Turkey.

Russia isn’t going to shut off gas to Turkey. Russia never does that (shutting off gas). It’s a Western canard.

Russia could, however, impose a no-fly-zone over Georgia, effectively blocking resupply and reinforcements to Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan is almost completely surrounded by Russian allies and bases. They rely on Georgia for military transit.

Druid , says: October 3, 2020 at 7:29 am GMT
@Ann Nonny Mouse

Ignorant post. Armenian nationalist were active in Russia prior to ww1, then supported Russian entrance into Turkish territory because they shared a religion. They stabbed the ottomans , of which they were a big part, in the back. The young Turks , who were actually donmeh jews, had them marched off to Syria and lebanon, etc, causing many deaths! The Armenian is still causing trouble for the Turks. They sided with the mongols in their battles against the Muslims, along wit the Georgians, repeatedly. More to a small story

anon [154] • Disclaimer , says: October 3, 2020 at 11:51 pm GMT

What’s going to happen to USA? The poverty and racial intolerance ,both seem to be undermining the stability and the ideological integrity of the country . I see many states emerging from the body of America.But the problems will not be resolved . It might just like like Caucasian territory or Balkan .

Anonymous [231] • Disclaimer , says: October 4, 2020 at 3:25 am GMT
@Yevardian

Pepe appears to be on the side of Azerbaijan, and thus also on the side of Turkey, Israel, the Jewish lobby, and jihadists.

Nice company.

vot tak , says: October 4, 2020 at 11:58 pm GMT

Reading this, my suspicion is this “mr. c” is part of the western disinformation machine, probably operating for the israelis.

Semiogogue , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:47 am GMT

1. BTC is described as ‘bypassing Iran’. One could easily argue it also bypasses *Russia* . Perhaps that’s what made it necessary for Soros & others to peel Georgia off from Russian control back in the day? Look how Russia responded by recapturing the Georgian Military Highway (South Ossetia).

2. Look in general at how Russia is willing to give up huge areas of territory so long as she keeps key strategic points of control: South Ossetia, Crimea, Transnistria, Abkhazia and… Armenia. Smell the coffee.

3. 2. ‘Mr. C’ is quick to mention Baku/Ankara joint exercises in August, but fails to mention Kavkas 2020 exercises led by Russia. Uh duh.

4. ‘Mr. C’ seems to ignore the fact that Armenia couldn’t have taken that territory in first place, or kept it, w/out Russian assistance. And idea ‘Russia can do nothing’ is absurd. As is the idea that Russia can’t supply Armenia because there’s no land connection. Did the allies have any problem keeping West Berlin supplied by air? Of course not. All nonsense.

5. The idea that there is a ‘Russia/Turkey’ strategic partnership is also silly. Where is this partnership? Turkey buying S-400s? So what? Are they in partnership in Syria? In Libya? No. So why would they be in N-K?

6. Weird. No mention of China and it’s growing relationship with Turkey. This probably tells you all you need to know about the author. Unless of course the author is just a fool, which is also possible.

Jivinski , says: October 5, 2020 at 4:04 am GMT

“Yet even before the collapse the Azerbaijani Army and Armenian independentists were already at war (1988-1994), which yielded a grim balance of 30,000 dead and roughly a million wounded.”

This is a wounded-to-killed ratio of thirty-three to one. Doesn’t make sense.

Majority of One , says: October 5, 2020 at 4:35 am GMT

Were Russia to be as devious and underhanded as the puppet regime in the Di$trict of Corruption, they would arrange for an overthrow of the present NATO/EU/U$ regime in Yerevan. With those bastards out of the way and Armenia no longer playing double jeopardy, it might be possible for a new Orthodox oriented Armenian government to come to some sort of arrangement with Baku.

At the same time, perhaps Syrian spetsnaz units could practice some infiltration tactics into Turkish semi-occupied “greater” Idlib and Ghurka style, behead a few Turkish officers running the show there.

“Sultan” Erdogan is playing loose and wild with his shattering economy and massive military. It is high time he was given a black-eye–one that would cause him to lose face among his own countrymen.

Mactoul , says: October 5, 2020 at 5:08 am GMT
@SZ

How many of the Japanese-American deportees died as consequence of deportation vs how many Armenians that died as consequence of their deportation.

It is not deportation that is alleged to be the Turkish crime but genocide. Please keep it mind.

Yukon Jack , says: October 5, 2020 at 5:16 am GMT

This is my educated guess, the Anglo-Zionists led by Rothschild and Netanayahu destablize the oil in the Middle East to keep their prices of oil in USD above 100 $/barrel

They have also blown up oil derricks in the North Sea, shut down Iranian and Iraq and Syria oil production. The game is clear, low oil prices are being met with wiping out the competition.

And causing hell in Iran and Venezueala. Back in 1954 Operation Ajax took out Mossadeq and installed the Shah – puppet of big oil. Before it was BP it was the Persian Gulf Oil Co. BP is owned mostly by the crown.

Trump’s secretary of state was Rex Tillerson CEO Exxon just like GW Bush picked Condoleeza Rice CEO Chevron to be his national security advisor.

The Israel angle is to get Iran and to goad Russia into war with the USA, the eventually goal is that USA-Russia-China are reduced while Jews rule the world from Jerusalem.

How much you wanna bet Bibi Satanyahu has a hand in this war? And Evangelical Christians will support Israel even if this war kills lots of Armenian Christians just like in Syria.

Since this war in on Russia’s doorstep Putin an Lavrov will try negotiations first then what will they do next. Putin has vowed the war will never come to Russia which means Russia will enter the theater on the anti-Zionist side.

Have you noticed every state within a few hundred miles of Israel is being torched and the natives driven out?

Ghali , says: October 5, 2020 at 6:17 am GMT

Back again to Pepe Escobar’s distortions of reality. Nagorno-Karabakh is an Armenian-occupied Azerbaijani territory. In fact, no country in the world recognises it as an “Independent” as Escobar likes to mislead us. Armenia should do the right thing and withdraw its forces, including foreign militants from there. Like Israel, Armenia is playing the role of a victim of a “holocaust”.

GMC , says: October 5, 2020 at 7:20 am GMT

Considering that the 2nd largest US/NWO Embassy in the World is in Armenia – a country of 2.9 million people, and that the new President was put in power by the West – the end game is to continue to surround Russia, screw up the New Silk Road, and be at Iran’s back door too. As said before , the domestic USA can totally look like the USSR in the 90s, but the NWO Foreign policy money is 100% – guaranteed. What do all those thousands of workers in that huge Embassy compound do ?

GMC , says: October 5, 2020 at 7:30 am GMT
@Tommy Thompson

Actually, once the Armenians were genocided , the Jewish bankers were the big shots left in Turkey. H Morgenthau, our Turkish ambassador along with being jewish himself, wrote about it in his reports. The Game hasn’t changed much – it stays the same. Thanks.

J , says: October 5, 2020 at 7:44 am GMT

About a third of Iran’s population is Azeri. Should they develop interest in the conflict, Iran may become involved. That would align Turkey and Iran vs Russia. That would be something.

ARemo , says: October 5, 2020 at 8:48 am GMT
@Yevardian

Damn right. We already have experience what happens when Turks get control of Christian Armenians – systematic gang rapes and death marches are the rule of the day. Turks are animals and letting them control any portion of Armenia is basically turning that place into a concentration camp.

Ming Shih-tsung , says: October 5, 2020 at 10:58 am GMT
@Yevardian

“Mr. C” probably stands for Cemal, given how biased he is.

anon [229] • Disclaimer , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:01 pm GMT
@Yukon Jack p>

Fact: 1979 was the year that “big oil” LEGAL contracts were to expire and the “puppet” Shah had threatened as early as 1973 (when he was instrumental in making OPEC a powerful entity) that in 1979 Iran “would sell Iranian Oil to any buyer, at market prices”.

Fact: Iran, in 1978 produced 6 million barrels per day. It has never been permitted to reach those levels again.

Fact: Chinese, Indian, Syrian, Venezuelan, and God knows who else, all projects of the Global Cabal have been getting Iranian Oil (under their engineered boxing of Iranian nation) at levels that very likely are equal if not LOWER than the terms the Qajar idiots gave the insatiablely greedy and slimey English.

Alfred , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:05 pm GMT
@Ann Nonny Mouse perpetrated by Turkey.

And you did not mention that the only quarters of Smyrna/Izmir that were not torched in a fire in 1922 were the Jewish and Turkish quarters – what a surprise! An antecedent to 9/11. Here is the Jewpedia hiding the real story – as usual.

The Armenian and Greek quarters were destroyed and the Jews got a monopoly on the commerce. Done deal!

Great fire of Smyrna

Wielgus , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:09 pm GMT
@GMC

If the “colour revolution” assumptions were in force, there would be a host of denunciations of Azerbaijan and Turkey (the latter perhaps the real prime mover in this) by the USA and EU etc. There aren’t. The USA and EU may even tacitly support the Azerbaijanis, perhaps they hope the Russians and Iranians will become entangled in this affair and so forth.

Ugetit , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:14 pm GMT
@vot tak

…my suspicion is this “mr. c” is part of the western disinformation machine, probably operating for the israelis.

While I know nothing about the situation, after reading the article and the mostly excellent comments, I suspect your suspicion is correct.

Alfred , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:38 pm GMT

I have a suggestion.

How about swapping Nagorno-Karabakh for North Cyprus. I am sure the Greeks would be very happy to live with the Armenians. But the Sultan’s dreams of owning the Eastern Mediterranean would come to naught.

anon [137] • Disclaimer , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:45 pm GMT
@Lin

I’ve always associated that piece with the circus not knowing the title or its origin.

Stebbing Heuer , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:50 pm GMT
@Anonymous

Stalin did nasty things like that to keep the republics feuding with each other rather than pushing back against Moscow. The mixed-up borders of the ‘stans, further east, are testament to this. Fergana Valley?

Divide and rule. Still costing lives in pointless wars almost 100 years later.

Дима Трамп , says: October 5, 2020 at 1:07 pm GMT

At stake is the very existence of the Armenian people. Turkey is trying to finish what remains of them after the genocide last century. Both Erdoghan and Aliev have stated, that they want a “final solution” to the “Armenian problem”.

It’s an existential battle for the Armenians.

Дима Трамп , says: October 5, 2020 at 1:09 pm GMT
@Yevardian

We all know what they did to the Armenians in 1915.

Дима Трамп , says: October 5, 2020 at 1:11 pm GMT
@Alfred

Exactly. The history of Turkey since 1880-s is full of ethnic cleansings and genocides of the non-muslim people such as Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians.

MLK , says: October 5, 2020 at 1:16 pm GMT

My thanks to Escobar for taking on a subject rather obviously not susceptible to 2,700 word essays, along with attention worthy links.

His biases are not my own but he’s thoughtful and certainly doesn’t hide them.

In this and so many other incidents we can see how thoroughly Trump has moved the American ship of state despite the relentless efforts of foreign and domestic resistance to neutralize America First and destroy him.

It’s really quite something the way Obama’s presidency in all its disastrous fullness has been memory-holed. The defense of it being that it merely extended Bush’s world-historical incompetence and malefactions.

Could you have turned US unipolarity following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact into a “moment” if you tried? I couldn’t.

You will be way ahead of most everyone if you get your mind around that and the geopolitical sad story that is CCP China winning the post-Cold War quarter-century hands down.

We inevitably come back to the point that the whole drama can be interpreted from the perspective of a NATO geopolitical hit against Russia – according to quite a few analyses circulating at the Duma.

Ukraine is an absolute black hole. There’s the Belarus impasse. Covid-19. The Navalny circus. The “threat” to Nord Stream-2.

To pull Russia back into the Armenia-Azerbaijan drama means turning Moscow’s attention towards the Caucasus . . .

I confess that I get no end of enjoyment over bellyaching on behalf of those powers the Obama administration was turning the world over to. Nord Stream II was merely the down payment on Russia’s assistance/acquiescence in throwing the electron to Hillary, with the sky the limit for China, Russia and Iran once Democrats and their foreign allies had neutralized free and fair elections.

Now all of these powers must deal with a real POTUS who asks “What have you done for the US lately?”

The USG and Russia have cooperated where geopolitical interests align. More will follow once Trump takes the oath again. As I’ve explained previously, despite its high-risk position in the Resistance matrix, Russia/Putin have (unsurprisingly, to me) acted skillfully and with circumspection.

The same cannot be said for Iran. Nor China, particularly since the end of last year.

Ashino Wolf Sushanti , says: October 5, 2020 at 1:27 pm GMT

https://www.putin-today.ru/archives/109463
https://vz.ru
Михаил Мошкин

Why Russia needs Azerbaijan !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The aggravation of the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh has raised a number of questions. In particular, why Moscow is in no hurry to stand up for Armenia and why it does not sharply criticize
Azerbaijan. The answer is that Moscow and Baku have very close relations, and not only economic relations. So what is the value and irreplaceability of Azerbaijan for Russia?

[MORE]
Z-man , says: October 5, 2020 at 1:52 pm GMT

Border and population changes are in order. A quarter of N-K goes back to Azerbaijan and the rest closer to Armenia proper plus the capital city goes to Armenia with a 50 mile wide band connecting it with the rest of Armenia. The Azeris get the rest of their lands now occupied by the Armenians. Will it happen? Probably not, just look at Kosovo..

God's Fool , says: October 5, 2020 at 2:05 pm GMT

There is a province between Ngorno Karabakh and Armenia proper of roughly of the same size belonging to Azerbaijan, so why not just exchange it with each other to avoid further conflict and bloodshed?

Дима Трамп , says: October 5, 2020 at 2:57 pm GMT
@God's Fool

There is no guarantee that Turkey will not try to then eliminate whatever remains of Armenia.

Remember, Turkey genocided Armenians and wiped out close to 80% of them in 1915 through 1922. Armenian populated areas stretched from what is now Armenia until the shores of Eastern Mediterranean. The only thing that is left of it is Kessab in modern day Syria.

Majority of One , says: October 5, 2020 at 3:14 pm GMT
@Ghali e fake, false and fraudulent, whether in Asia or Africa. Over time, justice will prevail and borders will reflect the ethno-national composition of its long-term inhabitants.

That said, the current regime in Yerevan needs to be overthrown, as it was established in conjunction with the interests of the Cabal/Nato and their various puppet regimes. Armenia is the oldest Orthodox Christian nation in the world and was severely genocided by the Donmeh covert Jewish Masons who called themselves the “Young Turks” who were led by Enver Pasha.

By the way, who are you, Ghali? Do you have a dog in the fight? Are you connected with an intel agency?

anaccount , says: October 5, 2020 at 3:21 pm GMT

Excellent article, normally I pass over Pepe for the naughty articles on Unz but I might have to take another look.

My only critique is that the article feels pro-Azeri but that’s balanced with an informative description how this started in July, including an accurate appraisal of Turkish behavior.

I’m not Azeri or Armenian so I didn’t have a dog in this fight until I noticed Israel’s support for Azerbaijan. It’s nothing personal, I have only one hate.

Shaman911 , says: October 5, 2020 at 3:27 pm GMT

Jewish Bankers shifting profits to other Jewish bankers. Funding all sides and profiting from the mass graves again. 5000 years and nothing has changed.

GMC , says: October 5, 2020 at 3:36 pm GMT
@Wielgus

The Turks are the US Army in this – with their proxy armies sent to help the Azerbaijanis, just like the US Army /Israelis and their proxies Isis, al Nusra, al Qaeda etc. in Syria. The US and their 6000 employees at the Embassy, don’t have to say anything – they back both sides – just like the Zionists do – in the US political parties. Things don’t change , Tactics don’t change. Thanks.

A.R. , says: October 5, 2020 at 4:30 pm GMT
@Majority of One

You are asking him if he has a dog in this fight? What about yourself? You very clearly have a dog in this fight yourself, haven`t you?
Try to cut down on the hypocrasy, why don`t you, and at the same time maybe moderate your “holier than thou” attitude.

[Oct 04, 2020] Is The War Over Nagorno-Karabakh Already At A Stalemate-

Oct 04, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Moon of Alabama Brecht quote " U.S. President Trump Has Caught 'The Flu' | Main October 03, 2020 Is The War Over Nagorno-Karabakh Already At A Stalemate?

Seven days after Azerbaijan attacked the Armenian held Nagorno-Karabakh territory it has not made any territorial progress.

Overview map

Iran and Georgia have both large Azeri and Armenian minorities within their territories.
bigger

Detail map

bigger

The highlands of Nagorno-Karabakh are ethnically Armenian. The light blue districts were originally Azeri but have been ethically cleansed during the war in the early 1990s.

Turkey is supporting Azerbaijan by supplying it with Turkish drones and with 'moderate Syrian rebel' mercenaries from Syrian and Libya . All are flown in through Georgian air space. Other mercenaries seem to come from Afghanistan . Additional hardware comes by road also through Georgia. Another supporter of the attacker is Israel. During the last week Azerbaijani military transport aircraft have flown at least six times to Israel to then return with additional Israeli suicide drones on board. These Harop drones have been widely used in attacks on Armenian positions. An Israeli made LORA short range ballistic missile was used by Azerbaijan to attack a bridge that connects Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia. Allegedly there are also Turkish flown F-16 fighter planes in Azerbaijan.

Turkey seems to direct the drones and fighter planes in Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh through AWACS type air control planes that fly circles at the Turkish-Armenian border.

The attack plan Azerbaijan had in mind when it launched the war foresaw to take several miles deep zones per day. It has not survived the first day of battle. Azerbaijan started the attack without significant artillery preparation. The ground attack was only supported by drone strikes on Armenian tanks, artillery and air defense positions. But the defensive lines held by Armenian infantry were not damaged by the drones. The dug in Armenian infantry could use its anti-tank and anti-infantry weapons to full extend. Azerbaijani tanks and infantry were slaughtered when they tried to break into the lines. Both sides had significant casualties but overall the frontlines did not move.

The war seems already to be at a stalemate. Neither Armenia nor Azerbaijan can afford to use air power and ballistic missiles purchased from Russia without Russian consent.

The drone attacks were for a while quite successful. A number of old air defense systems were destroyed before the Armenians became wiser with camouflaging them. The Azerbaijani's than used a trick to unveil hidden air defense positions. Radio controlled Antonov AN-2 airplanes, propeller driven relicts from the late 1940s, were sent over Armenian positions. When the air defense then launched a missile against them a loitering suicide drone was immediately dropped onto the firing position .

That seems to have worked for a day or two but by now such drone attacks have been become rare. Dozens of drones were shut down before they could hit a target and Azerbaijan seems to be running out of them. A bizarre music video the Azerbaijanis posted showed four trucks each carrying nine drones. It may have had several hundreds of those drones but likely less than one thousand. Israel is currently under a strict pandemic lockdown. Resupply of drones will be an issue. Azerbaijan has since brought up more heavy artillery but it seems to primarily use it to hit towns and cities, not the front lines where it would be more useful.

It is not clear who is commanding the Azerbaijani troops. There days ago the Chief of the General Staff of Azerbaijan was fired after he complained about too much Turkish influence on the war. That has not helped. Two larger ground attacks launched by Azerbaijan earlier today were also unsuccessful. The Armenians are currently counter attacking.

In our last piece on the war we pointed to U.S. plans to 'overextend Russia' by creating trouble in the Caucasus just as it is now happening. Fort Russ notes :

The current director of the CIA, Gina Haspel , was doing field assignments in Turkey in the early stages of her career, she reportedly speaks Turkish, and she has history of serving as a station chief in Baku, Azerbaijan , in the late 1990s. It is, therefore, presumable that she still has connections with the local government and business elites.

The current Chief of the MI6, Richard Moore , also has history of working in Turkey -- he was performing tasks for the British intelligence there in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. Moore is fluent in Turkish and he also served as the British Ambassador to Turkey from 2014 to 2017.

The intelligence chiefs of the two most powerful countries in the Anglosphere are turkologists with connections in Turkey and Azerbaijan. It would be reasonable to assume that a regional conflict of such magnitude happening now, on their watch, is far from being a mere coincidence.

Before President Trump stopped the program the CIA had used the Azerbaijani Silk Way Airlines in more than 350 flights to bring weapons from Bulgaria to Turkey to then hand them to 'Syrian rebels'. Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, is not only a CIA station but also a Mossad center for waging its silent war against Iran.

The former Indian ambassador to Turkey M.K. Bhadrakumar has written two interesting pieces on the current conflict. In the first one he reminds us on the 2018 color revolution in Armenia which he had thought meant trouble for Moscow .

I have never perceived it that way. While Armenia's current Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan tried to get into business with 'western' powers and NATO there was no way he could fundamentally change Armenia's foreign policy. A hundred years ago Turkey, with the second biggest NATO army, had genocided Armenians. They have never forgotten that. The relation to Azerbaijan were also certain to continue to be hostile. That will only change if the two countries again come under some larger empire. Armenia depends on Russian arms support just as much as Azerbaijan does. (Azerbaijan has more money and pays more for its Russian weapons which allows Russia to subsidize the ones it sells to Armenia.)

After Nikol Pashinyan was installed and tried to turn 'west' Russia did the same as it did in Belarus when President Lukashenko started to make deals with the 'west'. It set back and waited until the 'west' betrayed its new partners. That has happened in Belarus a few weeks ago. The U.S. launched a color revolution against Lukashenko and he had nowhere to turn to but to Russia . Now Armenia is under attack by NATO supported forces and can not hope for help from anywhere but Russia.

Iran likewise did not fear the new government in Yerevan. It was concerned over Pashinyan's recent diplomatic exchanges with Israel which were at the initiative of the White House. But that concern has now been lifted. To protest against Israel's recent sale of weapon to Azerbaijan Armenia has called back its ambassador from Israel just two weeks after it opened its embassy there.

Pashinyan will have to apologize in Moscow before Russia will come to his help. As Maxim Suchkov relays :

This is interesting: Evgeniy "Putin's chef" Prigozhin gives short interview to state his "personal opinion" on Nagorno-Karabakh. Some takeaways:

- Karabakh is Azerbaijan's territory
- Russia has no legal grounds to conduct military activity in Karabakh
- there are more American NGOs in Armenia than national military units
- PM Pashinyan is to blame
- until 2018 Russia was able to ensure ARM & AZ discuss conflict at the negotiation table, then US brought Pashinyan to power in Yerevan and he feels he's a king & can't talk to Aliyev

I wonder if Prigozhin's remarks suggest he'd be reluctant to deploy his Wagner guys to Armenia, if needed or if he is asked to do so, or he's just indeed stating his own views or it's a way to delicately allude to Pashinyan that Moscow not happy with him ... ?

Russia's (and Iran's) interest is to refreeze the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. But that requires compliant people on both sides. It therefore does not mind that Azerbaijan currently creates some pressure on Pashinyan. But it can not allow Azerbaijan to make a significant victory. One of its main concern will be to get Turkey out of the game and that will require support for Armenia. Iran has a quite similar strategy. The U.S. will probably try to escalate the situation and to make it more complicate for Russia. It is likely silently telling Turkey to increase its involvement in the war.

Russia will likely only intervene if either side makes some significant territorial gains. Unless that happens it will likely allow the war to continue in the hope that it will burn out :

The upcoming winter conditions, coupled with the harsh terrain, will limit large-scale military operations. Also, the crippled economies of both Azerbaijan and Armenia will not allow them to maintain a prolonged conventional military confrontation.

Posted by b on October 3, 2020 at 17:28 UTC | Permalink


james , Oct 3 2020 17:42 utc | 1

thanks b....informative... another proxy war is how this looks to me with all the usual suspects involved... they couldn't get what they wanted in syria, so now onto this...
dh , Oct 3 2020 18:04 utc | 2
Trump hasn't said much about this conflict yet. He probably has his eye on Armenian/American voters.
Kali , Oct 3 2020 18:05 utc | 3
The war started the day after negotiations between Russia and Turkey over Syria and maybe Libya also failed. Now the Azeri military complains about too much Turkish involvement which can only mean one thing--complaining about taking orders from Turks. So this looks like a Turkish aggression against Moscow? Meant to make a point about Syria? Libya?
Blue Dotterel , Oct 3 2020 18:17 utc | 4
In fact, most of your links are propaganda from both sides. We really have no idea what is going on on the ground.

In fact, most of your links are propaganda from both sides. We really have no idea what is going on on the ground.

Azerbaijan's position is justified, given that Armenia illegally occupies Azeri territory. The failure here is on the OSCE group for not being able or willing to resolve the conflict. Azerbaijan has a right to regain its territory by force, if necessary.

Russia may very well allow Azerbaijan to retake its territory, if it can, but draw a red line as to entering Armenia proper. The Current Armenian government is hardly a friend of Russia.

A good summary of the situation is Pepe Escobar's https://asiatimes.com/2020/10/explosive-stakes-on-the-armenia-azerbaijan-chessboard/


Blue Dotterel , Oct 3 2020 18:21 utc | 5
Posted by: Blue Dotterel | Oct 3 2020 18:17 utc | 4

Saker's link doesn't require a login
https://thesaker.is/whats-at-stake-in-the-armenia-azerbaijan-chessboard/

Josh , Oct 3 2020 18:27 utc | 6
Thanks B.
james , Oct 3 2020 18:29 utc | 7
@ Blue Dotterel | Oct 3 2020 18:17 utc | 4... do you feel the same way about crimea and ukraine taking it back? curious... you live in turkey if i am not mistaken.. are you turkish??
Bemildred , Oct 3 2020 18:31 utc | 8
Mountains are not good places to fight wars. Tends to be bloody, expensive, and useless.

I wonder what Haspel thinks she is doing too?

Maybe they could federate Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, form a union state, call it Caucasia, we can send all our white supremacists there.

Gary , Oct 3 2020 18:32 utc | 9
First Israeli attack on Armenia in 2017

In a rare move, the Defense Ministry suspended the export license of an Israeli drone manufacturer to Azerbaijan in light of claims that the company attempted to bomb the Armenian military on the Azeris behalf during a demonstration of one of its "suicide" unmanned aerial vehicles last month.
The two Israelis operating the two Orbiter 1K drones during the test refused to carry out the attack, Two higher ranking members of the Aeronautics Defense Systems delegation in Baku then attempted to carry out the Azerbaijani request , but, lacking the necessary experience, ended up missing their targets.
Last year, Azerbaijan used another Israeli suicide drone, an Israeli Aerospace Industries Harop-model, in an attack on a bus that killed seven Armenians.
Last year, the country's president, Ilham Aliyev, revealed Azerbaijan had purchased some $5 billion worth of weapons and defense systems from Israel.

Blue Dotterel , Oct 3 2020 18:44 utc | 10
Posted by: james | Oct 3 2020 18:29 utc | 7

My citizenship is the same as yours. No one recognizes Nagorno Karabagh independence, not even Armenia.

Bulent Ecevit, two time PM of Turkey, leftist and a poet, suggested the logical solution to the problem years ago. He suggested that Armenia cede land along the Armenian/Iran border of similar size so that Azerbaijan could unite with its southern territory Nakhchivan, thus Nagorno Karabagh could be exchanged for this territory. Both sides would be winners one assumes.

Apparently, no one liked the idea despite its fairness. I assume the Azeris in NK would have to be exchanged with the Armenians in the corridor in a population exchange for this to be realized.

arata , Oct 3 2020 18:55 utc | 11
@2 Kali
"The war started the day after negotiations between Russia and Turkey over Syria and maybe Libya also failed"

More than a week before start of the war, everyone involved in the region politics knew the war is imminent. Two days before the start of war Zarif rushed to Moscow.
Blue Dotterel , Oct 3 2020 18:57 utc | 12
Posted by: Bemildred | Oct 3 2020 18:31 utc | 8

You mean the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic
https://wiki2.org/en/Transcaucasian_Democratic_Federative_Republic

Didn't last long.

Iñigo , Oct 3 2020 19:02 utc | 13
This bastard of Prigozhin goes where the money flows.
And the money flows from Baku.
Do not give much credit to this thug.
Or perhaps Crimea belongs to Ukraine?
R Rose , Oct 3 2020 19:03 utc | 14
@ Blue Dotterel

"Bulent Ecevit, two time PM of Turkey, leftist and a poet, suggested the logical solution to the problem years ago. He suggested that Armenia cede land along the Armenian/Iran border of similar size so that Azerbaijan could unite with its southern territory Nakhchivan, thus Nagorno Karabagh could be exchanged for this territory. Both sides would be winners one assumes.

Apparently, no one liked the idea despite its fairness. I assume the Azeris in NK would have to be exchanged with the Armenians in the corridor in a population exchange for this to be realized."

That reads like a reasonable solution. Too bad it wasn't embraced.


b "The highlands of Nagorno-Karabakh are ethnically Armenian."? Nagorno Kharbakh is internationally recognized Azerbaijan territory

Pashinyan's placement in Armenia was meant to give an advantage to those that 'brung him' Your claims to the otherwise are some kind of pretzel logic.
Georgia absolutely flat out denied any passage of 'rebels' through their territory. That claim is utter unsubstantiated rubbish.

"have never perceived it that way. While Armenia's current Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan tried to get into business with 'western' powers and NATO there was no way he could fundamentally change Armenia's foreign policy"

Why because you say he couldn't? The one constant is change.


AtaBrit , Oct 3 2020 19:04 utc | 15
While it is not a solution as such, I fully agree with b's last point about Russia and Iran preferring to 'refreeze' the game and remove Turkey from the board.

Since the kick off I have wondered to what extent this is an Azerbaijani initiative and to what extent a Turkish one.

Either way, as I posted on the open thread, Lavrov and Cavusoglu agreed a couple of days ago that a ceasefire was necessary and Russia reiterated its strong stance against the presence of foreign militias in the conflict. Let's hope sober heads prevail. As Rouhani stated very clearly, the region can not withstand another war.

ARIES , Oct 3 2020 19:10 utc | 16
The "invisible hand" of International Zionism is driving the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh:

https://toranja-mecanica.blogspot.com/2020/10/a-mao-invisivel-do-sionismo.html

Blue Dotterel , Oct 3 2020 19:11 utc | 17
Posted by: james | Oct 3 2020 18:29 utc | 7

Sorry, didn't really answer your question. Kosovo, N. Cyprus, Crimea (annexation) and NK independence are all regarded as illegal accoding to international law, as far as, I know. None have had a proper UN sponsored referendum.
Although Turkish N. Cyprus did vote to reunite with Greek S. Cyrprus in a UN referendum, but the Greek Cypriots nixed it, and were immediately admitted to the EU as a prize for their pigheadedness.

Is it any wonder that Turks don't trust the Christian West or East? Neither the Grek Cypriots or the Armenians have any incentive nor desire to negotiate in good faith because the US, Europe and Russia are unwilling to compel them to, but reward them instead with territorial freezes that benefit them.

The ethnic Muslim Turks in both cases get screwed because of the racist propaganda directed at them through the ages.

Pat , Oct 3 2020 19:19 utc | 18
Wow, Blue Dotterel, the hatred for Armenians runs deep in you. Nakhichevan was handed over to Azerbaijan by the Soviets even before Karabakh/Artsakh was. Then the ethnic cleansing of its majority Armenian population and destruction of ancient Armenian monuments began so there would be little trace of its pedigree. Armenia has been chipped away at and betrayed by their so-called betters generation upon generation. They are not budging nor should they.
Galust , Oct 3 2020 19:30 utc | 19
You can buy as many weapons as you want, if your soldiers don't know how to fight it's not going to help. Whether you get 4000 Syrian rebels or 40,000 to Azerbaijan it still won't help them. If Azerbaijan could take those lands they wound have done it without asking Russia's permission. Even with advanced weapons they stand no chance. Armenians are using mostly antiquated and cheap air defense tech to shoot down the most advanced and expensive drones in the world. Thousands of their troops got slaughtered And hundreds of tanks destroyed so they could get one village that no one needs ? Wow great results. If they continue with these results for 2 more weeks they are going to need a brand new army. One thing Azeris have difficulty understanding is that in real life Might makes Right. Armenians learned this lesson back in 1914 when they got slaughtered and no one cared, not even the Christian west or orthodox Russia. Azeris just need to learn to leave with defeat and shame. And Azeris don't understand how bizarre and funny their army music videos look outside Azerbaijan. Same thing with Armenian videos. Not sure why both sides think there is a need to glorify war which creates grief and misery.
circumspect , Oct 3 2020 19:32 utc | 20
As always and interesting piece of work with some interesting comments and links for one to learn some angles on this situation.
Blue Dotterel , Oct 3 2020 19:33 utc | 21
Posted by: Pat | Oct 3 2020 19:19 utc | 18

What makes you think I hate Armenians? I grew up with many Armenian friends and acquaintences in my home country. Even in Turkey, I have worked with Armenians (Turkish citizens, of course) and even had and Armenian (from Armenia) cleaning women for my flat.

I certainly do think Armenians have had poor to incompetent, even racist leaders. Sort of like the US recently. Indeed, both countries have even had a similar Covid19 mismanagement.

No, I have no problem with Armenians, any more than I do with USAians or any other peoples.

Blue Dotterel , Oct 3 2020 19:55 utc | 22
Posted by: Pat | Oct 3 2020 19:19 utc | 18

You state "the ethnic cleansing of its majority Armenian population" with out any context, but you do realise that Armenians are quite capable of and certainly committted ethnic cleansing themselves. From the Pepe Escobar article:
https://thesaker.is/whats-at-stake-in-the-armenia-azerbaijan-chessboard/

"The peace talks are going nowhere because Armenia is refusing to budge (to withdraw from occupying Nagorno-Karabakh plus 7 surrounding regions in phases or all at once, with the usual guarantees for civilians, even settlers – note that when they went in in the early 1990s they cleansed those lands of literally all Azerbaijanis, something like between 700,000 and 1 million people)."

So, fact, the Armenians ethnically cleansed some 700,000 to 1 million Azeris from the Azeri lands they now occupy including NK.

Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity. Unfortunately, is commonplace in war time, and even in peace time.

Kooshy , Oct 3 2020 19:56 utc | 23
To make countries eligible to become part of the NATO the west first they would need to be cleansed going through a western inspired and planed color revolution. Russian resistance formula to prevent these countries joining NATO is to make these countries an economic, political and military basket case by making parts of these countries' territory contested, and out of control of western recognized seating governments. Once countries territorial integrity becomes challenged and out of control of western inspired governments, it becomes a challenge to be absorbed by any for any alliances. Such a country is a failed country dependent on western economic, political and military freebies. Likes of Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan etc. We shall see when, US/west feel, this will not work and will go nowhere, and tries to climb down the unipolar peak. Both of these countries are dependent on Iran and Russia.
Jen , Oct 3 2020 20:30 utc | 24
Blue Dotterel @ 17:

Self-determination is considered a major principle of international law. This principle is included in the UN's Charter (Chapter 1). Even if a group of people goes ahead with declaring its independence and breaking away from a country it dislikes being part of, as in the case of Crimea, without consulting with the UN in any way, the UN cannot object to this act. What Crimea did, did not violate international law.

Had the Crimeans consulted with the UN, they very likely would have been advised to remain part of Ukraine.

Self-determination does not require any support or sponsorship from the UN.


AriusArmenian , Oct 3 2020 20:33 utc | 25
Good analysis by MOA, and I also hope the war burns out going nowhere.

As to those that say NK is Azeri territory: after the Armenians were genocided on the street of Baku in the 1990's and Azeri's destroyed 5,000 Armenian monumemts would you just 'walk away' and not protect the people of NK? And after getting out followed by the Azeri's butchering the Armenians of NG it will be ignored!

Why did the Turks bring all those jihadis to Azerbaijan to fight: they will run the massacres in NK.

Blue Dotterel , Oct 3 2020 20:47 utc | 26
Posted by: Jen | Oct 3 2020 20:30 utc | 24

I am not disagreeing with the Crimean's decision, and indeed sympathize with it, but still question whether it shouldn't be considered illegal. I mean, really, how does it differ from Kosovo separating from Serbia, or the Turkish Cypriots from the Greeks. The UN does not consider the Turkish Cypriots independent. Perhaps they need to be absorbed by Albania and Turkey respectively to be considered "legal", just as Russia absorbed Crimea, although it is not considered legal, either. So why hasn't Armenia annexed NK? Why hasn't the UN recognized NK as a separate state?

Anyway, we are not discussing our preferences here. The Greek Cypriots rejected uniting their country with the Turks under a UN referendum, but the Turks voted for a united country. Why are the Turkish Cypriots not recognized as a country by the UN or anyone, but Turkey. Why have they not been rewarded with EU membership as the Greeks were? Is it any surprise that the Greeks won't negotiate in good faith with the Turks? Why should they? They get the benefits. the Turks not.

Jackrabbit , Oct 3 2020 20:50 utc | 27
As I noted in the last thread on this topic: the war serves to make the Azeris more dependent on the West. 'Winning' the war is perhaps not the goal of those behind the conflict.

!!

Flo , Oct 3 2020 20:52 utc | 28
Amusing typo in "... but have been ethically cleansed during the war in the early 1990s."
Blue Dotterel , Oct 3 2020 20:54 utc | 29
Posted by: AriusArmenian | Oct 3 2020 20:33 utc | 25

So far the jihadis are hearsay, not fact nay more than the PKK are fact fighting with the Armenians. It would not be surprizing in either case, but neither has been confirmed as fact, but merely propaganda.

Again, it is not surprising that some people in the "Christian world attribute all the massacres and destructions on the Muslims but ignor the massacres and ethnic cleansing committed by the "Christian" side. This is is a tacit, perhaps subconscious racism that has existed for hundreds of years. It is so difficult to be objective when you have been brought up to dislike, perhaps even hate the other, isn't it?

Blue Dotterel , Oct 3 2020 20:56 utc | 30
Posted by: Flo | Oct 3 2020 20:52 utc | 28

Yeah, someone's got to learn to proof read.

james , Oct 3 2020 21:03 utc | 31
@ Blue Dotterel ... thanks for your comments... you never said, but i take it you are of turkish descent.. either way, i like the comments you make, even if i don't know enough to agree or disagree with them.. there are usually 2 sides to every story, but we often don't hear both sides stories..
Хау јес ноу , Oct 3 2020 21:13 utc | 32
"The Greek Cypriots rejected uniting their country"
As I understand it the war in Cyprus started when Greek Cypriots abolished the rules stipulated by British colonizers meant to subjugate majority Greek population. Those rules gave Turk Cypriots larger portion of the power then the Greek.
Voting for unification expecting to come back to the same discriminatory laws against Greek Cypriots is non-option for the Greek Cypriots.
The other thing regarding proposition to Armenians to trade its own historical land for the other part of its own land and call if fair is very biased by my opinion. It is almost the same as proposition to Serbia to trade part of its land with current Serbian majority in the Nato occupied part of the country (Kosovo and Metohia) for the other part of the Serbia proper where some of the land has Albanian majority.
Proposal to trade a corridor to the Azerbaijans Nakhchivan for the corridor to Armenians Nagorno Karabagh would be a fair proposal.
So in both cases/proposals (Cyprus and Armenia) on the surface seem fair but if someone scratch the surface the situation appear to be far from the fair.
And in the both cases the presentation is biased for the Turkish side ... by accident.
Et Tu , Oct 3 2020 21:16 utc | 33
MoA Rocks
sad canuck , Oct 3 2020 21:20 utc | 34
Stupid people fighting stupid wars for stupid reasons. The peoples of the Caucasus need to learn to live in peace with each other or the region will continue to be a backwater exploited for great power geopolitical games.

Russia and Iran are correct to stay out of this and let the idiots kill each other. If there was any significant security threat from the mob of unruly idiots running Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia; the Russian and Iranians would roll over them all in 48 hours and there is not a damn thing anyone outside the Caucasus could do about it.

Et Tu , Oct 3 2020 21:21 utc | 35
Posted by: Flo | Oct 3 2020 20:52 utc | 28

Yeah, someone's got to learn to proof read.

Agreed, sorry Mr B, no malice intended, but your blog's credibility with unfamiliar audiences could potentially be undermined with some occasionally 'liberal' use of the English language.

Respect for using your foreign language skills of course, but perhaps a friendly proof reader with native English skills could also be an idea..

Blue Dotterel , Oct 3 2020 21:23 utc | 36
Posted by: james | Oct 3 2020 21:03 utc | 31

No, I am of mixed European descent, both east and west. And yes, that is the problem; we seldom do seek out both sides. When one looks at the Assange case, one sees the the problem of our age (and many others) where the prosecution is allowed to present its case with all prejudice, but the defense is repeatedly hampered by the supposedly impartial judge. And the media, well what to the people get - propaganda, often through ommision in this case.

Similarly, peoples are judged by through the propaganda of a culture or society, usually to benefit those with power. So people are taught to demonize or denigrate the other assuming their own to have upstanding moral character or, if defeated in some way, victims needing redress.

After the bombing of the Turkish consulate in Ottawa in the early 80s by an Armenian terrorist group, ASALA, I made a point of educating myself on the so called genocide issue, but had a hard time finding the Turkish point of view in Canada. As fortune would have it, I found employment in Turkey, and eventually discovered what was difficult to find in Canada: an alternative point of view concerning the issue and many others. Examining the writers' treatment of facts and their academic backgrounds was certainly educational in many cases.

Suffice it to say that on being able to actually see the "defense", I came to different judgements from those I would be able to come to in my home country.

james , Oct 3 2020 21:33 utc | 37
i recommend a piano duel between an Azerbaijan and Armenian to work it out... forget the guns and killing people part...

one example of armenian musician (on youtube) Tigran Hamasyan

one example of azerbaijan musician (on youtube) Leila Figarova

james , Oct 3 2020 21:36 utc | 38
@ Blue Dotterel | Oct 3 2020 21:23 utc | 36.. thank you for this as well.. i hear what you are saying.. it is an ongoing battle to get all the information and nuances.. we probably don't ever get all the information necessary which is why i resort to believing war is not the answer.. easy for me to say this here on the westcoast of canada...
Clueless Joe , Oct 3 2020 21:49 utc | 39
Ah yes, the "other side's" point of view about Armenian genocide. Did you look for the Nazis' point of view about the Shoah, too?
Point is, Turkey has been genociding (directly or by proxies) non-Muslim people since the late 19th century, and keeps trying to do it everywhere it can. In a way, Kurds are lucky to be Muslim, they're just occupied and suppressed instead of being mass-murdered by the millions - unlike Cypriots, Greeks, Armenians, Yazidis, Assyrians and others.
S , Oct 3 2020 21:50 utc | 40
The seven surrounding regions should be returned to Azerbaijan, so that 600,000 refugees can return to their homes. NKAO should be allowed to join Armenia to avoid creating new refugees.

I understand that legally NKAO is part of Azerbaijan, but Armenians have been living in Artsakh for thousands of years, and it is unrealistic to expect them to give up and leave. On the other hand, it is morally wrong to preserve the status quo and thus accept the ethnic cleansing of the 90s. That's why a compromise is needed.

hopehely , Oct 3 2020 21:53 utc | 41
Posted by: Blue Dotterel | Oct 3 2020 19:55 utc | 22
Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity. Unfortunately, is commonplace in war time, and even in peace time.

Yeah, when was that when Bulgarians expelled Turks from Bulgaria, 1989? It was tragic, hard to watch.
Nationalism is evil. I blame French for that disease.

Somewhat unrelated question: so Karabakh is written in Turkish Karabağ, which is quite similar (to me) to Montenegro, Karadağ. Is the similarity accidental, or both words have related meaning / connotation?

foolisholdman , Oct 3 2020 21:54 utc | 42
Posted by: Blue Dotterel | Oct 3 2020 20:54 utc | 29
So far the jihadis are hearsay, not fact nay more than the PKK are fact fighting with the Armenians. It would not be surprizing in either case, but neither has been confirmed as fact, but merely propaganda.

https://uk.yahoo.com/news/syrian-recruit-describes-role-foreign-173138233.html

David G , Oct 3 2020 22:16 utc | 43
Blue Dotterel | Oct 3 2020 18:44 utc | 10:
Bulent Ecevit, two time PM of Turkey, leftist and a poet, suggested the logical solution to the problem years ago. He suggested that Armenia cede land along the Armenian/Iran border of similar size so that Azerbaijan could unite with its southern territory Nakhchivan, thus Nagorno Karabagh could be exchanged for this territory. Both sides would be winners one assumes.
I would not be one who so assumes. Armenia would be nuts to give up their border with the one neighbor supportive of them while creating contiguity between Turkey and Azerbaijan's main territory.
james , Oct 3 2020 22:20 utc | 44
i recommend the 2 articles b linked to up above by M.K. Bhadrakumar for greater historical context of what is at play here...
Josh , Oct 3 2020 22:25 utc | 45
An article with an interesting perspective from almayadeen.net
https://m.almayadeen.net/analysis/1426965/%D8%AA%D8%B1%D9%83%D9%8A%D8%A7-%D9%88-%D8%A5%D8%B3%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%A6%D9%8A%D9%84----%D9%87%D9%84-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D9%82%D8%AA%D8%A7-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%A3%D8%B0%D8%B1%D8%A8%D9%8A%D8%AC%D8%A7%D9%86
Dr Wellington Yueh , Oct 3 2020 22:30 utc | 46
@james #37 re: piano duel

One of my all-time favorite recordings is Love, Devotion, Surrender (Santana, McLaughlin). The very first piece on the album, a cover of Coltrane's "A Love Supreme," has the two guitarists engage in a master-acolyte argument that frantically escalates, culminating in a crescendo of...agreement?

David G , Oct 3 2020 22:33 utc | 47
foolisholdman | Oct 3 2020 21:54 utc | 42:

Yeah, those Syrian "rebels" that Turkey shipped to Azerbaijan are more than hearsay and rumor. My heart really bleeds for them that when they got there they found they were facing a well-equipped and trained army, rather than having their pick of defenseless Christian villages where they could bring to bear their skills in robbing, raping, enslaving, and beheading.

Richard Steven Hack , Oct 3 2020 22:42 utc | 48
Posted by: sad canuck | Oct 3 2020 21:20 utc | 34

Correct. This is what you get when chimpanzees are allowed to form "states" to further their primate competition with each other.

ptb , Oct 3 2020 23:00 utc | 49
@b Thanks for the detailed analysis!

Even without conquering anything, with a large supply of drones and cheap yet robust comms (I feel the need to think of point to point IR, but I don't know enough about modern radio), the attacker can do a lot of damage without losing anything that expensive, i.e. potentially cheap spotter and relay drones, plus the munitions themselves. Air defense technology made to counter turn-of-the-century jets/helis/cruise-missiles, is not really appropriate. Handing out manpads in quantity creates other problems.

Patroklos , Oct 3 2020 23:32 utc | 50
This is what I come to MoA for. And it's nice to see b disclose his authorship with his trademark idiomatic slips ("full extend" for "to their full extent", 'unveil' for 'reveal' and 'relicts' for 'relics', etc).
arby , Oct 3 2020 23:48 utc | 51
right on Patroklas.
David G , Oct 3 2020 23:59 utc | 52
Patroklos | Oct 3 2020 23:32 utc | 50:

"Full extend" was a slight error, but "unveil" seems perfectly fine to me, and "relicts" was a better choice than "relics" in that context. (Though really the Antonov An-2 isn't either a relic or relict "from the late 1940s": they were produced in vast numbers for decades.)

Chevrus , Oct 4 2020 0:16 utc | 53
@ Dr Wellington 46: Also 'Visions of the Emerald Beyond' by The Mahavishnu Orchestra is a fantastic album that I think captures the Fusion era with a sense of refinement and less of the "slop".
Bemildred , Oct 4 2020 0:18 utc | 54
Posted by: David G | Oct 3 2020 23:59 utc | 52

Extend should be extent, I like discover better there than reveal or unveil, and relic has religious connotations, relict implies "remnant" which might work, derelict suggests inoperable, hmmm.

Maybe "remnant" or "survivor" would work.

But to be honest B's usage didn't bother me reading over it, the Internets is nothing if not slovenly about grammar and usage.

Sunny Runny Burger , Oct 4 2020 1:28 utc | 55
Some people here speak of yet more "exchanges" of territory as if it wouldn't involve 100% replacement of the people living there. and almost certainly by murder. They seem to think ethnic cleansing can be undone by more ethnic cleansing or at the very least loudly support one more round of it as a "final solution". They make it easy to understand why Erdogan references Hitler in positive terms.

The suggestion that Armenia and Artsakh losing their borders to Iran is fair is silly and anything but fair. It is an invitation to more war and genocide after such a "peace deal". The "peace plan" is nothing but siege warfare, it is a barely disguised war plan targeting Armenia and Artsakh.

North Cyprus being presented as some kind of Turkish benevolence belies the fact of the current ethnic Turkic dominance of the demographics of North Cyprus which did not happen by natural means, ie. it was/is over forty years of steadfast ethnic cleansing. Almost none of them were Cypriot when the Turkish invasion happened no matter how much they lie and pretend they were.

Hoyeru , Oct 4 2020 2:00 utc | 56
@hopehely how conveniently you forget that Bulgaria was under the Ottoman rule for 500 years and plenty of Bulgarian got murdered by the Turks during that time. WHEN the Bulgarians rebelled against the Turks in 1875–78, the Europeans didn't wept for ALL the Bulgarian women, children and men that were savagely slaughtered by the Turks, but instead sent one guy who claimed he never saw any atrociousness.
YEah, most of modern peoples' memory goes as far back as WII, everything else is forgotten. FUCK YOU, the Turks have always been savages.
Piotr Berman , Oct 4 2020 2:11 utc | 57
Before President Trump stopped the program the CIA had used the Azerbaijani Silk Way Airlines in more than 350 flights to bring weapons from Bulgaria to Turkey to then hand them to 'Syrian rebels'. Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, is not only a CIA station but also a Mossad center for waging its silent war against Iran.

This is dubious. Why use an Azeri airline to ferry weapons over the border that separates Bulgaria from Turkey, with a choice of three highways, an electrified railroad, or even by a ship (164 nautical miles between the main ports of the two countries).

Biswapriya Purkayast , Oct 4 2020 2:18 utc | 58
If Blitzkrieg failed the Azeris will use the attrition war tactic and that is absolutely certain to succeed. Murad Gazdiev tweeted selfies posted by Jihadi imports in Azeri uniforms in Azerbaijan here: https://mobile.twitter.com/MuradGazdiev/status/1312372865937932289
Jihadis will therefore be used as canon fodder by Azerbaijan while the Ottomans take over the air combat, directly or indirectly. Unless Azerbaijan is stupid enough to attack Armenia directly there is nothing Russia will ever do about it.

At some point approaching rapidly Armenian frontline positions will collapse and then there will be a panicked refugee flood into Armenia from Nagorno Karabakh and the surrounding occupied Azeri areas. At that point Nagorno Karabakh will become impossible to defend. Whether Azerbaijan permits Erdogan to seed the area with jihadis is an open question, but at the least Erdo will place Ottoman troops there to "guard against Armenia".

Without Nagorno Karabakh Armenia is actually worth very little to Russia. Even if it could be "taught a lesson" by Putinist restraint it would be strategically useless and a resource hole. A NATO Armenia, with or without a NATO Azerbaijan, would be a strategic disaster but that's the way things seem headed.

circumspect , Oct 4 2020 2:39 utc | 59
Watching the latest South Front videos it is easy to see how drone technology makes it difficult to move vehicles and set up fixed positions. It looks like a very high technology affair to counter drones.

Very expensive very costly training would equate to excellent results in second and third world areas for combat drones. Again the war party wins. It would be cheaper to build stable societies. What a toxic mess. It must be some weird parallel groups of death cults pushing this continued chaos.

Maybe is is just plain old human nature with high tech advantages over bronze and iron weapons. Even the bronze age brought a long period of peace and prosperity for a time.

Counter-Drone equipment


uncle tungsten , Oct 4 2020 2:44 utc | 60
Turkey resupplies weapons to Azerbaijan through the fake independent Georgia
Dr Wellington Yueh , Oct 4 2020 2:48 utc | 61
@circumspect #59 re: human nature (stoopid monkeys with guns)

Pride, stubbornness and stupidity - toxic, and tragic. A movie that quite well illustrates this is Lolly-Madonna XXX . It's such a brutally sad movie.

Piotr Berman , Oct 4 2020 3:58 utc | 62
If Blitzkrieg failed the Azeris will use the attrition war tactic and that is absolutely certain to succeed. Murad Gazdiev tweeted selfies posted by Jihadi imports in Azeri uniforms ...
Posted by: Biswapriya Purkayast | Oct 4 2020 2:18 utc | 58

I beg to differ. This is not Libya, both sides have relatively large armies, Armenians have weapons, high ground, prepared positions and people who believe that the choice is between standing the ground and exile (or worse). They will not be demoralized by few hundred casualties. Azerbaijan has low ground, attack uphill is not easy, and the motivation of soldiers is not as good. After bringing few hundred or even few thousands of second rate jihadists the equation will not change (inequality if you will).

Of course, if the war is protracted, both sides will need supplies. Except for Turkey, no one declared the will to supply either side, but unofficial traffic is bound to happen. Russia and Iran will surely neutralize any supplies from Turkey and Israel, they need to maintain the regional balance that so far is in their favor.

Then there is no potential for tipping the balance by direct intervention: it will trigger direct Russian response. Concerning the coming winter, one should read Wikipedia "Battle of Sarikamish". On New Year Eve of 1915, Turkish army advised by Germans attacked Russian positions after crossing high mountains. Because of even bloodier fighting in France, Russia was attacking in East Prussia to relieve the French and Caucasus Army was at half of full strength. The result was that 1/3 of Russian troops were lost, a lot of them to frostbite, and about the Turks there are debates: did 1/10 of them survive, a bit less, or a bit more.

p> " U.S. President Trump Has Caught 'The Flu' , Main

" U.S. President Trump Has Caught 'The Flu' | Main

[Oct 02, 2020] Army Chief of Staff General James McConville disingenious defence of MIC

Notable quotes:
"... As soon as many generals retire, they become the high-paid consultants and lobbyists for the major weapons manufacturers. There was a time when the Boston Globe and papers wrote about it. I wonder how many will now. It is time to recognize the problem and face up to the destructive influence it is having on our nation and our families in both our foreign and domestic policies. ..."
"... This is another consequence of allowing the people who own the media to own other things. Allowing the people who make bullets and bombs to own media is a sure recipe for perpetual war. ..."
"... It is quite normal for a top General to protect his cabal of corruption. He still has his slush fund money to protect. These military "Heroes" are in the habit of sending men to their deaths, just to advance themselves into top jobs with the Military Industrial Complex. ..."
"... They retire into prime Lobbying positions as well. This corruption has produced more broken Veterans than Covid-19 has produced deaths. ..."
"... “ I can assure the American people that the senior leaders would only recommend sending our troops to combat when it is required in national security and in the last resort, ” As invading Syria, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Grenada, Cambodia, Laos.... and many other countries was a last resort to secure the US national security. ..."
"... Trump says those things, and at the same time increases the Pentagon's budget & spending to over $1 Trillion (more than the next 15 Countries combined, and 13 of them are your allies).. ..."
"... Trump is picking up some that vote that supported Tulsi Gabbard, or so I speculate. Though he speaks with a bit of forked tongue -- stealing oil in Syria, won't pull out of Iraq when told by Iraqi government; still in Afghanistan long after the Pentagon lost the war there again another war lost against a fourth world country. ..."
"... An interviewer should test this man's integrity with a simple question, such as.. "When you retire, will promise to live off your generous pension....like Eisenhower in his rocking chair....and not go to work for an arms manufacturer or think tank or any other paid position?" ..."
"... Trump should spin the rest of the beans. Directly and indirectly, the Violence Industry is the biggest employer in the US. It's a gigantic social program. ..."
"... I think Trump is posturing for re election purposes . He is clearly in the hands of the deep state. ..."
"... Trump promised to end America’s “endless wars” . Just look at the people he appointed. They all love war. and trying to expand them. Russia showed the world, convoys of stolen Syrian oil. Than Russia bombed them. Now the US is stealing even more Syrian oil and nobody is bombing it. ..."
"... Biden was thinking about rebuilding contracts for his family and friends before the first bombs ever fell General.. ..."
Oct 02, 2020 | www.rt.com

Army Chief of Staff General James McConville has vehemently rejected Donald Trump's comments alleging that the military's top commanders wish to entangle the US in as many wars as possible in order to enrich weapon manufacturers.

" I can assure the American people that the senior leaders would only recommend sending our troops to combat when it is required in national security and in the last resort, " McConville, a Trump appointee, said during an online conference on Tuesday. " We take this very, very seriously in how we make our recommendations. "

The general added that many of the US commanders have sons and daughters that currently serve in the military and some of them " may be in combat right now. " The general declined to more directly respond to Trump's allegations, saying the military should remain out of politics.

Will someone tell him? Morning Joe brings up EISENHOWER to counter Trump's critique of Pentagon & military industrial complex

The Chief of Staff was referring to the highly publicized comments Trump made on Monday. The president said that " the top people in the Pentagon " might not be " in love " with him " because they want to do nothing but fight wars " to provide business for the US military-industrial complex.

During his 2016 campaign, Trump promised to end America's " endless wars " as he often calls them. However, the long-time military bureaucrats he appointed to command publicly opposed Trump's propositions to reduce US military presence in Afghanistan and Syria.


T. Agee Kaye 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 07:41 PM

Please. Who is he kidding. Rather than recognize the problem like an Al-Anon, he discredits himself and his institution even by suggesting there isn't one. As soon as many generals retire, they become the high-paid consultants and lobbyists for the major weapons manufacturers. There was a time when the Boston Globe and papers wrote about it. I wonder how many will now. It is time to recognize the problem and face up to the destructive influence it is having on our nation and our families in both our foreign and domestic policies.
whitey Interests T. Agee Kaye 10 September, 2020 10 Sep, 2020 02:09 PM
This is another consequence of allowing the people who own the media to own other things. Allowing the people who make bullets and bombs to own media is a sure recipe for perpetual war.

The media needs to be splintered into a thousand pieces with the new owners not allowed to own anything else. The Sherman anti trust act used to spell this out in law.

LonDubh 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 07:04 PM
It is quite normal for a top General to protect his cabal of corruption. He still has his slush fund money to protect. These military "Heroes" are in the habit of sending men to their deaths, just to advance themselves into top jobs with the Military Industrial Complex.

They retire into prime Lobbying positions as well. This corruption has produced more broken Veterans than Covid-19 has produced deaths. VFW (Victims of Futile Wars) have seen their ranks increase and their support mechanism decreased. Another generation of American youth destined for the scrapheap of "Heros"

IgyBundy LonDubh 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 04:25 AM
Have you noticed what great liars these so called honorable military brass have become? Better than most politicians..
Frank Cannon LonDubh 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 09:09 PM
1/3 less troops in germany, no new wars , troops in Syria brought home . all indicates that he is making progress. & is fighting against endless wars
Northern Light 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 07:52 PM
“ I can assure the American people that the senior leaders would only recommend sending our troops to combat when it is required in national security and in the last resort, ” As invading Syria, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Grenada, Cambodia, Laos.... and many other countries was a last resort to secure the US national security.
Kwok Shsee Northern Light 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 09:49 AM
You forgot Iraq, Libya, Korea, and Yugoslavia~
changyao 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 06:58 PM
Everyone knows that there is collusion between some serving and ex top guns with the MIC. Resulting in endless wars everywhere and many countries are forced by security tension to buy more expensive weapons which they can ill afford
Juan_More changyao 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 07:41 PM
It is not the generals but the politicians that started the endless wars. The politicians get campaign donations to their Super PACs or to an offshore numbered bank account.
Jewel Gyn 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 09:07 PM
What national security threat and last resort when all wars conducted are in foreign soils. Even if there are threats on the hundreds of military bases deployed around the world, the question is still 'what the *f are US troops there in the first place'.
Mark La Brooy 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 09:59 PM
Is it any surprise that the US spends $700 billion on defense. Next comes China with only $90 billion or thereabouts. Yes, Trump is right. It is all about the US military industry complex and continuous war.
JingsGeordie 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 07:23 PM
Apparently it's been the last resort continually since 1775.
Sinalco 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 07:05 PM
Trump says those things, and at the same time increases the Pentagon's budget & spending to over $1 Trillion (more than the next 15 Countries combined, and 13 of them are your allies).. As they say, action speaks louder than words - those are just cheap empty words to rally his base for the coming election.
whitey Interests Sinalco 10 September, 2020 10 Sep, 2020 02:13 PM
Unfortunately Trumps base likes war.
GottaBeMe Sinalco 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 09:28 PM
If you remember, it’s congress that approves of spending. And both the Dems and repubs authorize more and more money to the military.
PublicEnemy_1 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 08:32 PM
Trump not as much of a war monger as the establishment would like. Most Americans oppose war but that has never slowed the establishment. Probably the biggest reason the establishment is so opposed to Trump, among the other obvious reasons.
Kwok Shsee PublicEnemy_1 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 09:57 AM
Are you a kindergartener or just plainly naive?!!! Trump knows Americans love to hear this, so he is giving you the LIP SERVICE FCOL !!! He will pamper the MIC just as he has been doing in the last 4 years once the election in November is over! Exactly because americans are so incredibly foolish that Trump or Biden will be your next president, LOL!
donkeyoatee 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 01:52 AM
How was Vietnam or Iraq anything to do with US "national security" or the wars in Yemen or anywhere in the middle east and around the globe. The US isn't doing "National security" it's doing interference and domination.
Ekaterina 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 08:00 PM
I would laugh if this whole situation wasn’t so pitiful and sad. Eisenhower was right.
Shelbouy 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 10:34 AM
So many people say that Trump has not started any wars, which makes him ok. He didn't have to, there were enough already going on. What he did not do is stop any!
Juan_More 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 07:39 PM
When the Generals and Colonels end up with very cushy jobs in the MIC after they retire. It certainly does look like something is up. After all who authorised the F35, Ford class aircraft carriers and my favourite winner of the silly name for a boat the USS Zumwalt
NonDucorDuco 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 08:12 PM
The MIC stooges at the Pentagon don't need to say anything, as Trump's remark reflects what everybody already knows for decades.
Enki14 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 06:42 PM
LOL The facts speak for themselves and if one considers the endless war(s) since 911 were based on LIES...the towers were brought down by controlled demolition...in charge that day was dick cheney.
whitey Interests Enki14 10 September, 2020 10 Sep, 2020 02:25 PM
Wall St did 911.
Rocky_Fjord 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 11:39 PM
Trump is picking up some that vote that supported Tulsi Gabbard, or so I speculate. Though he speaks with a bit of forked tongue -- stealing oil in Syria, won't pull out of Iraq when told by Iraqi government; still in Afghanistan long after the Pentagon lost the war there again another war lost against a fourth world country. And he's flirted with an invasion of Venezuela, perhaps to keep the hawks and neolibs like Bolton and Bill Krystal on the edge of their seats. Sort of like Merkel getting exercised over Navalny to counter all the blather of war hawks and those who want to scuttle Nordstream 2. Throwing the ideological dog a bone. It's satisfying to finally hear a US president pick up the theme Eisenhower warned of. Now let him tell the truth of the filthy soul of the CIA, to take up where JFK left off. Trump could do far worse than to thank Pence for his... See more
Jim Christian Rocky_Fjord 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 11:43 PM
Nah, Gabbi is a Democrat. But she's a good kid. She, unlike 99% of them, got a taste of ugly military service and spoke out, only to be crushed. All you need to know of military/political corruption is to study THAT.
Karl194 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 07:51 AM
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." Dwight Eisenhower (former USA President)
pykich Karl194 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 08:14 AM
says the man who signed the "Grenada Treaty"...
Jim Christian 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 11:37 PM
How many times has the 'good' general recycled himself between defense contractor jobs and board positions and then right back into the White House, sometimes to a University posting, then back to the Pentagon, rinsing and repeating several times after retirement? How do these Generals and Admirals become multi-millionaires otherwise? And there are hundreds of them. And they bring us the WORST, most corrupt procurement such as the Ford Class Carriers and the F-35, to name just TWO examples, albeit big ones Please. It's crooked as a 3-dollar bill. Look at the Pentagon opposition to Trump's every single overture toward peace in the Middle East (except Iran, which is a big mistake, our issues were resolved until they weren't under Trump). Any contest to the premise that the U.S. military is corrupt beyond repair is patently absurd. And this "General" is just the wrong representative to refute the truth. He is after all, part of the corruption.
Rocky_Fjord Jim Christian 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 11:46 PM
Two classes of US submarines were made with inferior steel from Australia. The steel was known by the contractor to be inferior, but the Pentagon did not run its own tests. So tens of billions wasted for subs that are unsafe at depths and of course in actual combat conditions. The generals and politicians float above it all like scu*m on a fe*tid pond.
shadowlady 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 09:24 PM
The Pentagon has to justify its enormous budget, they provoke conflict at every turn.
a325 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 09:06 PM
“I can assure the American people that the senior leaders would only recommend sending our troops to combat when it is required in national security and in the last resort" yada yada , of course you are going to say that. Admitting the truth would be instant career suicide
Raider Ssmc 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 11:47 PM
wasn't it Trump and many other presidents who were dishing out money left right and centre to the american war machine to build bigger and so called better weapons. Goes to show no matter what when push comes to shove the american government will always blame anyone else but themselves.
foxenburg 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 01:48 AM
An interviewer should test this man's integrity with a simple question, such as.. "When you retire, will promise to live off your generous pension....like Eisenhower in his rocking chair....and not go to work for an arms manufacturer or think tank or any other paid position?"
Dallas Snell Sr. 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 08:00 AM
Ever since Obama was elected we hear way to much out of these so called Generals. Jumping on a bandwagon is something active Generals should never do.
lectrodectus 10 September, 2020 10 Sep, 2020 02:06 AM
Frankiln Delanor Roosevelt: (During The Depression Created The WPA Works Progress Administration) "Instead Of Spending As Some Nations Do Half Their National Income In Piling Up Armaments And More Armaments For The Purposes Of War, We in America Are Wiser In Using Our Wealth On Projects Like This Which Will Us More Wealth And Greater Happiness For Our Children" (Fireside Chats) Similar To Dwight D Eisenhower.
RealWorld1 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 12:26 PM
Trump should spin the rest of the beans. Directly and indirectly, the Violence Industry is the biggest employer in the US. It's a gigantic social program.
Cabonnet 57 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 08:23 PM
I think Trump is posturing for re election purposes . He is clearly in the hands of the deep state.
Fred Dozer 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 12:17 AM
Trump promised to end America’s “endless wars” . Just look at the people he appointed. They all love war. and trying to expand them. Russia showed the world, convoys of stolen Syrian oil. Than Russia bombed them. Now the US is stealing even more Syrian oil and nobody is bombing it.
venze chern 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 11:18 PM
Is Trump really anti-war? Or he is just trying to exert his power over those hawkish generals in Pentagon to tell the world who is in charge of US? If he is truly against all kinds of war, that must be the only acceptable thing he has done so far.
pykich venze chern 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 08:13 AM
it would look like that he only engages in the conflicts that his son in law asks him to do, just a small subset of the larger set...
Anastasia Deko 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 03:42 PM
The war industry, the prison industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and many others, they all have their lobbyists and their plans for making more money. And manufacturing more wars, more prisoners, and more diseases is not beyond them. Freedom and democracy and high cholesterol are money making cons, and sometimes it takes a con like Trump to recognize it.
PurplePaw 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 02:59 PM
IF TRUMP WANTS TO END WARS ( KILLING) AND RIGHTLY SO THESE SO CALLED GENERALS NEED TO BE OUSTED FAST. THE MILITARY SHOULD BE IN MY VIEW INCLUDED IN POLITICS AND EXPOSED AS IN ANCIENT TIMES. A WARRIOR SHOULD BE ABLE TO BECOME CHIEF AS IN THE PAST. A PERSON LIKE ALEXANDER, JULIUS, BUT THEY MUST ALSO BE THE MOST GALLANT WITH HUMILITY AS IN ARTHUR'S DAYS. NONE OF THE HIGH MILITARY MEN HIDING BEHIND THE CLOAK IN THE DARK TO DECEIVE WHEN THE TIME IS RIGHT. TO MUCH OF THAT WHERE THEY ARE. TRUMP IS RIGHT ON HERE, STOP ABORTION.
pykich 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 08:10 AM
They should ask him what his plans after retiring are...
Ph7 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 06:06 AM
If he's so worried about national security "his" troops should be on the streets of US not in the bushes of Afghanistan and Iraq .
Orwellmatters 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 10:44 PM
off topic, but very important, Sen. Ben Sasse's op-ed regarding repeal of the 17th amendment. Haven't seen mention of it at RT. Whether you are red or blue, this is massive in returning power to the people.
DavidG992 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 06:08 PM
He could stage this 'ati-war' show only becasue democrats have ceded opposition to the military-industrial war machine to a belligerent fraud.
Anastasia Deko DavidG992 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 09:50 PM
The Dem big shots are pro-war, so they didn't cede anything. They just hope that the public doesn't realize what Biden is really about.
Dallas Snell Sr. 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 08:06 AM
Absolute truth really bothers these folks a lot. And Trump is not afraid to speak it.
Frank Cannon 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 08:58 PM
They leave the military for high paying indusrty jobs as a form of Briberty / reward for keeping the endless wrs going & business good..
Mark90168 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 04:24 AM
Every candidate before election become wise due to seeing sword over his heads but after winning the election they again become hate mongers and wars lovers. The US election candidates should never be trusted. It reminds me "The game of thrones."
Taoist Student 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 11:44 PM
This is easy. Trump has always done exactly as the pentagon wants. this is a stunt for Qanon votes that's all. Trump is smart he reads. He knows what Qanon thinks and wants to give them a bone.
Rocky_Fjord Taoist Student 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 11:47 PM
So the man can think and act -- well that's a start.
flakebuster 15 September, 2020 15 Sep, 2020 06:26 PM
General James McConville , even if you tell us that tomorrow the Sun will rise from the East we will not believe you, until we see it ourselves, general McCorrupt.
Karl194 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 07:55 AM
The DEEP STATE is build by the bosses in the FBI, CIA and the PENTAGON.
Winter7Mute 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 04:41 AM
Violence as a way of gaining power... is being camouflaged under the guise of tradition, national honor [and] national security. For almost 100yrs now.
Mark90168 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 05:04 AM
Every candidate before election become wise due to seeing sword over his heads but after winning the election they again become hate mongers and wars lovers. The US election candidates should never be trusted. It reminds me the game of thrones.
Dallas Snell Sr. 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 08:11 AM
Biden was thinking about rebuilding contracts for his family and friends before the first bombs ever fell General..
IgyBundy 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 04:22 AM
Army Chief of Staff General James McConville a man without honor a coward and a liar.. As most of the US military seems to be..
Arti Doane 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 12:11 PM
After Obama's purge of the military all that's left are the money making war mongers.
far_cough 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 04:08 AM
this 'national security' lie is getting really tired. but these general think american people are stupid enough to buy it.

[Sep 29, 2020] How much safer has the world become for Armenia since the collapse of the USSR

Sep 29, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOWEXILE September 27, 2020 at 2:17 am

Russian blogger:

Sep. 27th, 2020 | 02:57 pm

Ан-124 ВКС России прилетел в Армению.
Логистический ад, конечно.
Насколько для Армении мир стал безопаснее с развалом СССР, не правда ли?

An An-124 of the Russian Aerospace Forces has arrived in Armenia.

A logistical hell, of course.

How much safer has the world become for Armenia since the collapse of the USSR, isn't that so?

source

[Sep 29, 2020] Rostec announced the results of the Russian Be-200ES firefighting operations in Turkey

Sep 29, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

ET AL September 22, 2020 at 7:21 am

Russian Avaiation: Rostec announced the results of the Russian Be-200ES firefighting operations in Turkey
https://www.ruaviation.com/news/2020/9/21/15439/

Over the past three months, the Russian Be-200ES amphibious aircraft flew more than 200 times for suppressing wildland fires in Turkey. Aircraft with Russian crews onboard have been participating in the firefighting missions at difficult and strategically important places and locations since June 16. Total flight time exceeded 400 hours .
####

I don't know how I missed this.

So while Russia has been putting out fires in fancy parts of Turkey (Izmir), Turkey has been continuing its fires in Syria!

[Sep 29, 2020] Armenia claims Azerbaijani artillery attacks are intensifying as Nagorno-Karabakh officials allege they've downed Azeri warplane -- RT Russia Former Soviet Union

Sep 29, 2020 | www.rt.com

Fighting between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh intensified, on Monday, with heavy civilian and military casualties reported amid disputed claims of an Azeri warplane being shot down.

Azerbaijani troops and forces from Nagorno-Karabakh have been trading artillery and rocket fire, with the population of much of Karabakh told to seek shelter. Meanwhile, Armenia has declared a general mobilization and barred men between the ages of 18 and 55 from leaving the country, except with the approval of military authorities.

The most intense attacks took place in the Aras river valley, near the border with Iran, and the Matagis-Talish front in the northeast of the region, according to Armenian Defense Ministry spokesman Artsrun Hovhannisyan. He claimed that the Azeri side has lost 22 tanks and a dozen other vehicles, along with 370 dead and many wounded.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1310588852793421824&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Frussia%2F501974-karabakh-fighting-intensifies-plane-downed%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=219d021%3A1598982042171&width=550px

Artur Sargsyan, deputy commander of the Nagorno-Karabakh military, said their own losses so far have amounted to 84 dead and more than 200 wounded. Both figures should be understood in the context of an ongoing information war run by the belligerents.

Vagram Pogosyan, spokesman for the president of the self-declared Artsakh Republic – the ethnic Armenian de-facto government in the capital Stepanakert – said their forces shot down an Azeri An-2 airplane outside the town of Martuni on Monday. This is in addition to some three dozen drones, including ones provided by Turkey, that the Armenian forces claim to have shot down over the past 48 hours.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-1&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1310642793065459712&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Frussia%2F501974-karabakh-fighting-intensifies-plane-downed%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=219d021%3A1598982042171&width=550px

Baku has denied the reports, saying only that two civilians were killed on Monday, in addition to five on Sunday, and 30 were injured. There was no official information on military casualties. Reports concerning the downed airplane were rejected as "not corresponding to reality."

Azeri forces have taken several strategically important locations near the village of Talish in Nagorno-Karabakh, Colonel Anar Eyvazov, spokesman for the Defense Ministry in Baku, said in a statement. He was also quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying that Lernik Vardanyan, an Armenian airborne commander, was killed near Talish. Armenia has denied this and labelled it "disinformation."

ALSO ON RT.COM Armenia braced for LONG WAR in Nagorno-Karabakh, PM Pashinyan's adviser warns saying Turkey behaves like 'regional terminator'

In a video conference on Monday, Azeri President Ilham Aliyev told UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres that the question of Nagorno-Karabakh should be resolved in line with UN Security Council resolutions guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, and called for the urgent withdrawal of Armenian troops from "occupied territories."

The current Azeri offensive is backed by Turkey, whose President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called Armenia "the biggest threat" to peace in the region and called for it to end the "occupation" of Azeri land.

"Recent developments have given all influential regional countries an opportunity to put in place realistic and fair solutions," he said in Istanbul on Monday.

ALSO ON RT.COM Time to end 'occupation' of Nagorno-Karabakh, Turkish leader Erdogan tells Armenia as border clashes with Azerbaijan continue

Unconfirmed reports that Turkish-backed militants from northern Syria have been transported to Azerbaijan to fight the Armenians have been denied by Baku as "complete nonsense." They amount to "another provocation from the Armenian side," Khikmet Gadzhiev, an aide to President Aliyev, told Al Jazeera.

Meanwhile, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan vowed his people "won't retreat a single millimeter from defending our people and our Artsakh." All Armenians "must unite to defend our history, our homeland, identity, our future and our present, " Pashinyan tweeted on Sunday from Yerevan.

Nagorno-Karabakh is one of several border disputes left over from the collapse of the Soviet Union. An enclave predominantly populated by Armenians, it seceded from Azerbaijan in 1988 and declared itself the Republic of Artsakh following a bitter war in 1992-94.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

[Sep 29, 2020] Elena Evdokimova on Twitter -- War correspondent Alexander Kharchenko also believes that Turkey operates drones that attack Nagorny Kharabah

Sep 29, 2020 | twitter.com

by Alexander Kharchenko

yesterday at 8:42 pm

In Karabakh Turkish drones #Bayraktar started systematic destruction of enemy armored vehicles. Of course they are ruled by the Turks. Azerbaijani operators simply could not learn how to manage them in such a short time. The Armenian side opposes them with the outdated Osa-AKM complexes. They cannot cope with this task.

Most likely, the Coral electronic warfire system operate in conjusction with the drones. They create interference, operators are distracted by false targets, while drones enter the target and destroy it. If in the near future the Armenian side will not be able to quickly clear the airspace, then the Azerbaijanis will show many more shots with the destruction of armored vehicles.

What can be opposed to #Bayraktar ? Do not think that they are invulnerable. "BUKs" and "Pantsir" systems cope well with them. But we cannot say yet whether they are in the area of hostilities.

By their actions, the Ottomans make it clear that strike drones will be deployed anywhere in the world where there are Turkish interests. That's their brand. Similar to the Syrian mercenaries. Accordingly, their opponents first of all need to think about building an effective air defense system.

If you have a territorial dispute with Turkey, then it is better not to run to the UN with another note of protest. And he will directly turn to Russia with a request to urgently sell several "BUKs". Trust that there will be much more benefit from it. Indeed, while the world community calls on the parties to sit down at the negotiating table, dozens of your soldiers are dying on the battlefields. And "BUK" in seconds can prove to a presumptuous guest that he was not expected in this sky. And neither he nor his brothers should appear here.

[Sep 29, 2020] Azerbaijani Army And Syrian Jihadis Launch Attack On Armenian Lines

Sep 29, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Paco , Sep 28 2020 10:09 utc | 34

Posted by: uncle tungsten | Sep 28 2020 3:16 utc | 26

Interesting link Evdokimova, 79% Armenians and 84% Azerbaijanis want the USSR back, that goes to confirm the castotrophe of the USSR dissolution, of course there would be no wars in that inmense area, in exchange for McDonalds advertised by Gorby we have now conflicts galore, Moldavia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kirguizia, Abjazia, Osetia.... and who needs to eat that crap?


Jen , Sep 28 2020 11:06 utc | 35

An opportunity to hit several skittles with one ball was too much to leave alone for the Turks, especially if the skittles could be hit down in someone else's backyard and particularly if that someone else happens to be a client state of Turkey's.

It surely also suits the United States in some way, if that opportunity leads to Russia and Iran becoming bogged down fighting in the Caucasus, and they are forced to take their attention (and money, arms and fighters) away from Idlib province in NW Syria.

So presumably if the Azeris could beat the Armenians with imported "Syrian rebels", that then would encourage home-grown rebel wannabes in Daghestan, Chechnya and other Muslim areas in the northern Caucasus to "rise up" against Russian rule. At the same time, Azeris in NW Iran would be inspired (in the wildest dreams of both the American and Turkish governments) to rise up against Tehran and declare their part of Iran independent.

Unfortunately the Armenians, despite their government's pro-American tendencies, recovered from what must have been surprise attacks and were able to retaliate quickly and hard. Now Russia has taken the high road and offered itself as a mediator.

Let's see if the US and the EU can persuade the Armenians with their offers of loans worth billions (presumably contingent on Armenians deferring to Israel as to whose Holocaust deserves to be called a "Holocaust" and not a mere genocide - even though Winston Churchill about 100 years ago or so used the term to describe the Ottoman massacres of Armenians and other Christian groups in their empire) away from Russian mediation and negotiation. If the money fails to lure Armenia into the IMF / World Bank debt trap, there goes the opportunity to scatter all the skittles.

Chevrus , Sep 28 2020 18:20 utc | 46

I'm trying to get a better contextual setup to this conflict. I recall the USA directed coup attempt dubber "Electric Yerevan" when a company from said nation bought the power company, ran it into the ground and used it as a basis for sparking protests. Next I am hearing that the current president is a "Random Guido" who answer to the USA. If so how does this effect Armenias strategic partnership with Russia? From what little I know about the Armenian spirit they are fiercely devoted to their culture. Many Americans of Armenian would fly back to the old country in order to take up arms. It seems as though this conflict is going to escalate if only because the damage done so far. Armenia is fully mobilizing.
In regard to the Donbass situation, I gathered that the Ukrops army was heavily laden with conscripts many of whom fled to Russia. They succumbed to the cauldron tactic due in part to be order by "results driven" leaders in the rear. That and they stuck to the roads and were easily flanked by smaller NAF units operating "in the green" What I found interesting (and disturbing) about this conflict is that it resembles what could very well happen in the USA, minus the armor although....

Chevrus , Sep 28 2020 18:20 utc | 46

I'm trying to get a better contextual setup to this conflict. I recall the USA directed coup attempt dubber "Electric Yerevan" when a company from said nation bought the power company, ran it into the ground and used it as a basis for sparking protests. Next I am hearing that the current president is a "Random Guido" who answer to the USA. If so how does this effect Armenias strategic partnership with Russia? From what little I know about the Armenian spirit they are fiercely devoted to their culture. Many Americans of Armenian would fly back to the old country in order to take up arms. It seems as though this conflict is going to escalate if only because the damage done so far. Armenia is fully mobilizing.
In regard to the Donbass situation, I gathered that the Ukrops army was heavily laden with conscripts many of whom fled to Russia. They succumbed to the cauldron tactic due in part to be order by "results driven" leaders in the rear. That and they stuck to the roads and were easily flanked by smaller NAF units operating "in the green" What I found interesting (and disturbing) about this conflict is that it resembles what could very well happen in the USA, minus the armor although....

H.Schmatz , Sep 28 2020 20:13 utc | 47

Although it is, clearly I suppose, not my field, from known and new mostly military analysis sources recently found, I will try form a somehow readable post...( forgive thus if I do not write the weapons denomination correctly...I make the effort to keep you informed...and alos take into account, I am figuring out the events without thoroughly studying the maps, I have passed the day working/making food shopping/taking a nap... )

On the doubts about whether Russia would intervene on behalf of Armenia, that wouldv happen if Armenia request assistance under CIS agreements, but Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh ( currently Republic of Arsakh, the name of ancient Great Armenia, to eliminate the azeri denomination Karabakh.. ) is not Armenia, it is a region which apealed self-determination but not recognized by any nation so far...not even by Armenia, due the ceasfire signed in 1994 ( what implies that the war never ended, but was frozen for a while, to be reignited from time to time...) Thread ( you translate the Twitts on your own this time...otherwise would get too long post..)

https://twitter.com/descifraguerra/status/1310634361042145282

It is on the grounds of CIS agreements, I guess, that today some Russian MiG-29 overflow Yerevan...

https://twitter.com/Political_Room/status/1310604450424328192

Both countries are very mountainous terrain, this is Caucasus, what makes advancement quite difficult, thus, eventhough at first moments success was falling on the side of Azerbaijan ( which counts with the unestimable help of Turkish swarms of drones and intelligence from Turkish AWACSm it seems that Armenia, which has its borders mined, has inflicted heavy loses in armor to Azerbaijan today, destroyed and captured....( warning disturbing content of people flying in the air space..), also list of fallen in the Armenian side, most milennials...This is when most fallen could have originated...in Martakhert, in the North...

https://twitter.com/14Milimetros/status/1310173020082843655

https://twitter.com/Political_Room/status/1310635885738819584

#LATEST HOUR #URGENT #Azerbaiyan army claims to have destroyed #Armenia's air defense in Martakhert (north), with 12 OSA systems destroyed. The #Martakhert garrison would be surrounded and offered the option to surrender.

https://twitter.com/301_AD/status/1310574779733340160

#LATEST HOUR First list of fallen in combat by #Armenia. Note that most are kids born in 2000. The Armenian Defense Ministry also claims that during a successful counterattack they have captured 11 armor including an advanced BMP-3.

https://twitter.com/Political_Room/status/1310356974010339330

It seems that modern warfare through drones is rendering heavy armor a bit obsolete, well, like seating ducks slowly advancing in mountainous terrain of Caucasus..

https://twitter.com/SubBrief/status/1310359802615300097

The miniature air campaign being carried out by the #Azerbaijan drones against #Armenia seems to be very successful. Its main protagonist is being the MAM-L micromissiles from #Turkey.

https://twitter.com/Political_Room/status/1310604904042500105

#Azerbaiyan has already deployed the TOS-1 Buratino thermobaric rocket launchers. The #Azerbaiyan drone air campaign continues to wreak havoc on the Armenian ranks.

https://twitter.com/Political_Room/status/1310549583735459841

BTW, @flighradar24, where some people use to follow flights path is under attack...guys are saying this is Turkey/ Azrbaijan so that their drones can not be followed..

https://twitter.com/DragonLadyU2/status/1310662606261284869

Some additional points in this thread by another guy who works for @descifraguerra, with what is described by him as #cutremapa ( an outline made in the run without much precision so as to clarify his points.. ):

There are skirmishes throughout practically the entire front but the "serious" fighting is concentrated in the areas marked A (Murov Peak), B (Agdara - Heyvali axis) and C (Fuzuli region). Especially in the latter, I refer to the video.

The ultimate goal of the Azeris appears to be a south-north pincer on the capital of Artsakh, Stepanakert, with all the difficulties that this entails. Taking this into account, it seems that there are two previous objectives.

The first of these objectives is to cut the M11, the main logistics artery of Artsakh, for which they have two options: A) Take the peak of Murov and block the road taking advantage of the heights. But storming up the mountain is always tricky.
B) Take the Heyvali junction. To do so, they must first cross several towns, such as Aghdara, and it is in this area where it seems that more artillery fire is concentrating in the last hours.

The second ideal objective would be to cut the M12, the second most important road in the area and therefore the second most important supply route, but considering its position this is something very difficult to carry out in most of its tracing.

So it seems that they are opting for a second objective, a priori simpler: to capture the Fuzali region (remember, zone C on the map) and cut the M12 at the entrance to Stepanakert itself (just 1.37 km south From the capital).

For now, it seems that the Armenians are holding up well to the south, although it is the front in which the most intense fighting has taken place so far this day, but they have less and less anti-aircraft and that allows the Azeri drones to act.

On the growing military drone industry being built by Turkey ( guess where the command and control of those swarms of drones attacking one day after another Khmeimin and Syrian positions and warehousesd is placed ), in the hands of his son-in-law, it seems that Syrian oil smuggling resulted most profitting...

Turkey is laying the foundations of its geopolitics in the massive use of drones in places of conflict where it has great interests.

To achieve his goals, Erdogan managed to establish his own drone industry. He is currently in the hands of one of his sons-in-law.

https://twitter.com/14Milimetros/status/1310345958564204546

Some historical curiosities about the two "main" contenders...

Did you know...

-Armenia was the first country in the world to adopt Christianity as its official religion (301 AD)

-Azerbaijan was the first Muslim country in the world to adopt the secular parliamentary republic as a model state (1918).

https://twitter.com/14Milimetros/status/1310247759363088400


[Sep 29, 2020] Erdogan fancies Turkey to be Russia's equal on the world stage

Sep 29, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MARK CHAPMAN September 29, 2020 at 3:45 pm

But Erdogan is so blatant in his challenges that it is plain he fancies Turkey to be Russia's equal on the world stage, and dares to poke it even as he takes actions that result in greater power and influence for Turkey. He needs a hard kick in the ass to remind him where his provocative actions are taking him. The west is unhappy with Turkey's cozying-up to Russsia, but is doubtless delighted when he behaves like this.

JAMES LAKE September 29, 2020 at 11:04 am

Karl,

Maybe Armenia could call it's new friends in NATO and in the EU

Please read the following it is a quote from an article over a Moon of Alabama.

" .. . Although a long-standing Russian partner, Armenia has also developed ties with the West: It provides troops to NATO-led operations in Afghanistan and is a member of NATO's Partnership for Peace, and it also recently agreed to strengthen its political ties with the EU. The United States might try to encourage Armenia to move fully into the NATO orbit. If the United States were to succeed in this policy, then Russia might be forced to withdraw from its army base at Gyumri and an army and air base near Yerevan (currently leased until 2044), and divert even more resources to its Southern Military District. "

Armenia after its colour revolution started to act in an anti -Russian way

Yet Russia is supposed to feel obliged to help Armenia?

What for? they have shown that they are going in another direction

And I think both Azerbaijan and Turkey looked at Armenia's behaviour to Russia and are taking full advantage of a weakened alliance.

KARL1HAUSHOFER September 29, 2020 at 1:10 pm

You make some good points. If Armenia has politically distanced itself from Russia and approached the West and the NATO then it makes no sense for Russia to offer help without strings attached. But Russia cannot let Turkey/Azerbaijan overrun Armenia either, or let Azerbaijan grab Nagarno-Karabakh, because it would strengthen Turkish position too much in the Caucasus region.

MARK CHAPMAN September 29, 2020 at 3:40 pm

Yes, you are plainly having the time of your life and yukking it up again like you do whenever something difficult happens to put Russia in a bad position – plainly, you are a real friend of Russia, and only motivated by concern. Keep on laughing and making jokes. Perhaps Russia should drop a bunker-buster on your house – would that be a martial enough reaction for you?

MARK CHAPMAN September 29, 2020 at 3:36 pm

They should – they should smack down a Turkish aircraft without warning and at the first available opportunity. Russia is trying to stabilize the situation and calm things down, while Turkey is openly backing Azerbaijan's military operation. A hard slap now could break the cycle, but it seems plain Erdogan will get away with whatever he is allowed to.

ET AL September 29, 2020 at 12:48 pm

It almost doesn't matter whether Turkey shot down the Armenian Su-25, rather that Armenia has publicly stated it. This is about crossing the Rubicon. For all the chest-beating and rah rah rah from In'Sultin' Erd O'Grand & Aliyev, both states have denied it happened. Here we clearly see the gulf between broadcast to self-and actual potential consequences of such an action.

Add to that Armenia has been open (not necessarily transparent) about its losses. Theres been nothing from Azerbaidjan except American Vietnam war style 'body counts' of Armenians.

It looks to me that Armenia are upping the ante to the max. and Azerbaidjan is left wanting by its response which makes no sense if its claims of victories/whatever are anywhere near true.

What I really want to know is what if any assistance, apart from words, the US is providing and comparatively Russia. One or them is clearly in a much better position than the other. There's really not much to go on as we know Russia does not broadcast and it certainly would not be in the current 'pro-EU' Armenian administrations interest either. Yet again, we are only left to ask what hasn't been said & done.

As far as I can see, Armenia is keeping most of its powder dry. The threat of 'other measures' is currently more useful (and doesn't entail the same risks) than actually enacting them. Maybe Putin will invite €µ to cover Aliyev's humilition as Sarkozy was for Sakaashiti's? Now that would be funny, but we must not get ahead of ourselves..

Strategically, each time In'Sultin' Erd O'Grand backs stunts like these, he exposes himself further to trouble at home. For Russia, not being fully NATO onside is evidently quite useful however distasteful his behavior is, but he may well be undoing himself and putting Turkey squarely back in to the western camp overall but retaining its nationalist Big Boy streak.

ET AL September 29, 2020 at 1:24 pm

BMPD: Директор Центра анализа стратегий и технологий о ситуации в Нагорном Карабахе
https://bmpd.livejournal.com/4151211.html

Осеннее военное обострение в Нагорном Карабахе для многих стало совершенной неожиданностью. Но специалисты, которые следят за военно-политической обстановкой в Закавказье, подобное развитие событий давно предсказывали. В частности, эксперты Центра анализа стратегий и технологий (ЦАСТ) еще два года назад спрогнозировали обострение ситуации в Карабахе. В их книге "В ожидании бури: Южный Кавказ" даны оценки, которые, судя по всему, подтверждаются сегодня, пишет Сергей Вальченко в материале для сайта MK.ru
####

More at the link.

This looks like a reasonable analysis. If you are lazy like I am, use and online translator.

I don't see how Armenia can accept the loss of critical territory even if the Azeri operations are 'limited.' According to the interview, Azerbiajan is repeating the tactics of 2018 which is a big NO NO according to Tsun Tzu. I would be surprises is Armenia hasn't already planned for this. The big fly in this ointment is Yerevan which may delay or limit a response and listen to its 'western partners.' That would cement Azeri successes and damage the 'Pro-EU' government. One reasonable strategy would be to actually encourage Azeri 'successes' as tehy would be tempted to go further than their limited goals and draw the forces in to a pre-prepared 'cauldron', aka kiling zone as occured previously in the Donbass and wrap up the Azeri army and gain ground. There's the risk that it wouldn't work either, yet again Tsun Tzu do not fight the next war as you fough the last

[Sep 29, 2020] Strategic Aims Behind The War On Armenia

Sep 29, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Strategic Aims Behind The War On Armenia

On Sunday Ilham Aliyev, the longtime dictator of Azerbaijan, launched a war on the Armenian held Nagorno-Karabakh area. That he dared to do this now, 27 years after a ceasefire ended a war over the area, is a sign that the larger strategic picture has changed.

When the Soviet Union fell apart the Nagorno-Karabakh area had a mixed population of Azerbaijani (also called Azeri) Shia Muslims and Armenian Christians. As in other former Soviet republics ethnic diversity became problematic when the new states evolved. The mixed areas were fought over and Armenia won the Nagorno-Karabakh area. There have since been several border skirmishes and small wars between the two opponents but the intensity of the fighting is now much higher than before.


Source: Joshua Kushera - bigger

In 2006 Yasha Levine wrote about his visit to Nagorno-Karabakh for The Exile. He described the uneven opponents:

In 1994 the Armenians won and forced Azerbaijan to a ceasefire. In the meantime Nagorno-Karabakh organized itself into a sovereign country [called Artsakh] with its own army, elected officials and parliament. But it still hasn't been recognized by any country other than Armenia and is still classified as one of the "frozen conflicts" in the region, along with the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia.

But this "frozen conflict" may soon heat up, if you believe what Azerbaijan's playboy/gambling addict/president, Ilham Aliyev, says. Not that Azerbaijanis should get too excited about another war: If Armenians are still the fighters they were ten years ago, then statistically, it's the Azeris who'll do most of the dying. While matched evenly in soldiers, the Azeris had double the amount of heavy artillery, armored vehicles, and tanks than the Armenians; but when it was over, the Azeri body count was three times higher then that of the Armenians. Azeri casualties stood at 17,000. The Armenians only lost 6,000. And that's not even counting the remaining Azeri civilians the Armenians ethnically cleansed.

Since the strategically-important Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline opened up, pumping Caspian Sea oil to the West via Turkey, the Azeri president has been making open threats about reclaiming Nagorno-Karabakh by force. The $10 billion in oil revenues he expects to earn per year once the pipeline is fully operational is going to his head. $10 billion might not seem that much -- but for Azerbaijan it constitutes a 30% spike in GDP. In every single interview, Aliyev can't even mention the pipeline project without veering onto the subject of "resolving" the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

Aliyev started spending the oil cash even before the oil started flowing and announced an immediate doubling of military spending. A little later he announced the doubling of all military salaries. Aliyev's generals aren't squeamish about bragging that by next year their military budget will be $1.2 billion, or about Armenia's entire federal budget.

Over the next 14 years the war that Yasha Levine foresaw in 2006 did not happen. That it was launched now points to an important change. In July another border skirmish broke out for still unknown reasons. Then Turkey stepped in :

Following the July conflict Turkey's involvement became much deeper than it had previously been, with unprecedentedly bellicose rhetoric coming from Ankara and repeated high-level visits between the two sides. Ankara appeared to see the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict as yet another arena in which to exercise its growing foreign policy ambitions, while appealing to a nationalist, anti-Armenian bloc in Turkey's domestic politics.

Turkey's tighter embrace, in turn, gave Baku the confidence to take a tougher line against Russia, Armenia's closest ally in the conflict but which maintains close ties with both countries. Azerbaijan heavily publicized (still unconfirmed) reports about large Russian weapons shipments to Armenia just following the fighting, and President Ilham Aliyev personally complained to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.

Turkey's President Erdogan intervened with more than rhetoric :

In August, Turkey and Azerbaijan completed two weeks of joint air and land military exercises, including in the Azerbaijani enclave of Naxcivan. Some observers have questioned whether Turkey left behind military equipment or even a contingent of troops.

The potential for robust Turkish involvement in the conflict is being watched closely by Russia, which is already on opposing sides with the NATO member in conflicts in Libya and Syria.

Russia sells weapons to both Azerbaijan and Armenia, but has a military base in Armenia and favors that strategic partnership.

Azerbaijan has bought drones from Turkey and Israel and there are rumors that they are flown by Turkish and Israeli personal. Turkey also hired 2,000 to 4,000 Sunni Jihadis from Syria to fight for the Shia Azerbaijan. A dozen of them were already killed on the first day of the war. One wonders how long they will be willing to be used as cannon fodder by the otherwise hated Shia.

There were additional rumors that there are Turkish fighter jets in Azerbaijan while Turkish spy planes look at the air-space over Armenia from its western border.


Source: IWN News - bigger

The immediate Azerbaijani war aim is to take the two districts Fizuli and Jabrayil in south-eastern corner of the Armenian held land:

While the core of the conflict between the two sides is the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, Fuzuli and Jabrayil are two of the seven districts surrounding Karabakh that Armenian forces occupy as well. Those districts, which were almost entirely populated by ethnic Azerbaijanis before the war, were home to the large majority of the more than 600,000 Azerbaijanis displaced in the conflict.

While there has been some modest settlement by Armenians into some of the occupied territories, Fuzuli and Jabrayil remain nearly entirely unpopulated.

The two districts have good farm land and Armenia, already poor, will want to keep them. It certainly is putting up a strong fight over them.

The war has not progressed well for Azerbaijan. It has already lost dozens of tanks (vid) and hundreds of soldiers. Internet access in the country has been completely blocked to hide the losses.

The losses do not hinder Erdogan's scribes to already write of victory :

Defending Azerbaijan is defending the homeland. This is our political identity and conscious. Our geopolitical mind and defense strategies are no different. Always remember, "homeland" is a very broad concept for us!

We are not making a simple exaggeration when we say "History has been reset." We are expecting a victory from the Caucasus as well!

Well ...

An hour ago the Armenian government said that Turkey shot down one of its planes:

Armenia says one of its fighter jets was shot down by a Turkish jet, in a major escalation in the conflict over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.

The Armenian foreign ministry said the pilot of the Soviet-made SU-25 died after being hit by the Turkish F-16 in Armenian air space .

Turkey, which is backing Azerbaijan in the conflict, has denied the claim.
...
Azerbaijan has repeatedly stated that its air force does not have F-16 fighter jets. However, Turkey does.

A Turkish attack within Armenian borders would trigger the Collective Security Treaty which obligates Russia and others to defend Armenia.

A Russian entry into the war would give Erdogan a serious headache.

But that might not even be his worst problem. The Turkish economy is shrinking, the Central Bank has only little hard currency left, inflation is hight and the Turkish Lira continues to fall. Today it hit a new record low .


Source: Xe - bigger

Azerbaijan has quite a bit of oil money and may be able to help Erdogan. Money may indeed be a part of Erdogan's motivation to take part in this war.

Russia will certainly not jump head first into the conflict. It will be very careful to not over-extend itself and to thereby fall into a U.S. laid trap.

Last year the Pentagon financed RAND Corporation released a report that laid out plans against Russia :

Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data from Western and Russian sources, this report examines Russia's economic, political, and military vulnerabilities and anxieties. It then analyzes potential policy options to exploit them -- ideologically, economically, geopolitically, and militarily (including air and space, maritime, land, and multidomain options).

As one option the report discussed to over-extend Russia (pdf) in the Caucasus:

The United States could extend Russia in the Caucasus in two ways. First, the United States could push for a closer NATO relation-ship with Georgia and Azerbaijan, likely leading Russia to strengthen its military presence in South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Armenia, and southern Russia.

Alternatively, the United States could try to induce Armenia to break with Russia. Although a long-standing Russian partner, Armenia has also developed ties with the West: It provides troops to NATO-led operations in Afghanistan and is a member of NATO's Partnership for Peace, and it also recently agreed to strengthen its political ties with the EU. The United States might try to encourage Armenia to move fully into the NATO orbit. If the United States were to succeed in this policy, then Russia might be forced to withdraw from its army base at Gyumri and an army and air base near Yerevan (currently leased until 2044), and divert even more resources to its Southern Military District.

The RAND report gives those options only a poor chance to succeed. But that does not not mean that the U.S. would not try to create some additional problems in Russia's southern near abroad. It may have given its NATO ally Turkey a signal that it would not mind if Erdogan gives Aliyev a helping hand and jumps into anther war against Russia.

Unless Armenian core land is seriously attacked Russia will likely stay aside. It will help Armenia with intelligence and equipment flown in through Iran. It will continue to talk with both sides and will try to arrange a ceasefire.

Pressing Azerbaijan into one will first require some significant Armenian successes against the invading forces. Thirty years agon the Armenians proved to be far better soldiers than the Azeris. From what one can gain from social media material that seems to still be the case. It will be the decisive element for the outcome of this conflict.

Posted by b on September 29, 2020 at 18:04 UTC | Permalink


div> As much as I appreciate b's conflict sitreps, I sure hope this one does not become a recurring one..

Posted by: Lozion , Sep 29 2020 18:29 utc | 1

As much as I appreciate b's conflict sitreps, I sure hope this one does not become a recurring one..

Posted by: Lozion | Sep 29 2020 18:29 utc | 1

c , Sep 29 2020 18:32 utc | 2
Thanks. The best explanación I have seen so far of this complicated situación
Sakineh Bagoom , Sep 29 2020 18:32 utc | 3
Love the report b.
This is how you use to have it on Syria. Keep it up.
GeorgeSmiley , Sep 29 2020 18:37 utc | 4
Best article in quite some time B, bravo!
karlof1 , Sep 29 2020 18:53 utc | 5
As I reported last week, the Armenians were one of the international participants in recent military exercises held in the Caucus region, and they frequently train with Russian troops as CSTO members. Neither the Azeris or Armenians can really afford a conflict, although the former have the better economic basis and have done a better job dealing with COVID. Because of their history, Armenians are better and more tenacious in combat. Until Nagorno-Karabakh is resolved, it will be exploited by the Outlaw US Empire.
Jackrabbit , Sep 29 2020 18:53 utc | 6
The war will draw Azerbaijan closer to NATO/Turkey just as Trump is turning the screws on Iran via extended UN sanctions.

Much of the Russian-Iranian trade would likely be conducted via Volga River and Caspian Sea.

What are the chances that we see mysterious attacks on shipping in the Caspian Sea?

<> <> <> <> <> <>

PS Erdogan's adventurism (aka Ottoman fantasies) seem like a smokescreen for Imperial operations.

!!

ptb , Sep 29 2020 18:57 utc | 7
Agreed very much with @1.

The trouble with this kind of intimate geography, is that it is very tempting to operate longer-range weapons or drones from the 'uncontested' portion of each country's territory, since each home territory is theoretically out of bounds of the conflict.

The main meaningful response to a long-range or unmanned attack, targeting the source, could then be used to blame the other side for any escalation. It seems Azerbaijan is more comfortable with this at the moment. Assuming they end up occupying more of the contested territory, they will end up on the receiving end of the same pattern, but either way the result would be the same.

Besides the muddled geopolitics and heartbreaking history, it makes for a relevant study in the state of modern drone and anti-drone systems, which will only increase in significance going forward, as guidance systems, software integration, networked/relay-based-communications and hard-to-detect point-to-point radio or IR comms are all more accessible now. (for example, what would you do if you had the capacity to make ~10 million of the things a year)

Altai , Sep 29 2020 19:02 utc | 8
Meanwhile, the radical blue ticks need some way to seem like they are superior to plebs who might be inclined to take Armenia's side. It's all very complicated, both sides are just as wrong you see!

https://twitter.com/Tom_deWaal/status/1310559223441485826

"1 No side has a monopoly of justice. Both sides have historical claims to Karabakh. It was the site of a medieval Armenian kingdom in the 12th century and an Azerbaijani (Persian Turkic Shia) khanate in the 18th c. Both peoples have lived together here, mostly peacefully."

But the people never changed, they were Armenian before and after the very brief period of being a part of that Khanate (75 years, he left this out) against their will. It's all the more surreal since the guy making the argument that 75 years of being under somebody's rule 300 years ago makes you theirs forever.

It's all the more surreal given the writers own father is from Amsterdam given.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Netherlands

1556–1714

I don't see anyone suggesting Spain has legitimate claims on Flanders and the Netherlands.

It must be hard for bluechecks because their vaunted 'rules-based international order' such it might ever have been said to exist with constant violation without consequence by powerful countries is the source of the problem. Azerbaijan is only still after this territory based on the thin logic that despite being 85-90% Armenian at it's lowest point in the last 250 years and 100% Armenian today and being totally separated from Azerbaijan politically, the UN still considers it's de jure Azerbaijan. The map says it's Azerbaijan!

Yul , Sep 29 2020 19:29 utc | 9
It is surprising seeing Erdogan who is a Muslim Brotherhood fanatic supporting a mostly Shia Muslim country of Azerbaijan.
May be Persia should get involved to get back the land it lost during the Persian-Russo wars !
R.A. , Sep 29 2020 19:33 utc | 10
B, it is good to see you reporting on matters that are within your area of expertise. Your reporting on conflicts of this kind is invaluable, and I always follow your reports with great interest.

I wish I could say the same for your recent post about Covid19, but there are aspects of that post that are unfortunate. It is clear, for example, that you have not been following the latest work on cross-reactive immunity--that is, the evidence that people who have not yet been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 nevertheless have some immunity to it, due to exposure to other corona-viruses. Nor is your overall analysis of the actual lethality of the disease convincing--you seem to be unaware of the vast difference between young people and children, who almost never die of Covid19, versus the elderly, who are much at risk. This has great implications for what policies are best in dealing with the disease.

I recommend the following source, which allows investigation of the lethality of Covid19 more thoroughly: https://swprs.org/studies-on-covid-19-lethality/

ptb , Sep 29 2020 19:43 utc | 11
@Altai 8

Yes NK was historically Arm going back forever. Nevertheless, the geography made defending it impossible without occupying adjacent areas which as far as I know, were Azeri in modern times. There are few happy answers to be found here.

As far as biases are concerned, deWaal is giving the interview to Al Jazeera, and the network is (not surprisingly) somewhat more sympathetic to Turkish and therefore Azeri statements on the matter, though they typically do a better job keeping a professional facade than domestic (US) media at least. But that gives a hint.

AtaBrit , Sep 29 2020 19:45 utc | 12
Excellent couple of articles, 'b'. You are really on form. Thanks.

Think you are spot on regarding money and deflection. What we've seen recently from Erdogan is vast expenditure in construction - unnecessary pandemic hospitals with extortionate rental agreements to be met by the local authorities - and in technology - the latest TechnoFest headed by his other 'damat' advertised significant projects to be funded by the state, and of course oil and military: In these sectors nepotism and cronyism rule. it is those companies close to Erdogan that reap very significant benefits. So, any earnings that can be gleaned from Aliyev are very welcome I am sure.

The other aspect is deflection from a series of foreign policy failures, and several serious domestic failures, one being the management of Covid currently and its obvious manipulations and the abject failure of the online education system in which it is estimated between 35 and 50 percent of pupils are NOT participating. The others being the economy as 'b' alluded to and the failed Greek, Libyan and Syrian situations. Other than that, the political ground does not favour Erdogan at all and he is terrified of losing his 2023 deadline and therefore desperate to win back more of the electorate.

Turks talks about Turkey and Azerbaijan as One People, Two states - the Azeris do not say the same. But it is a sign of just how important this is to Turks. As 'b' has mentioned, the Turkish media is already in faitytale / victory mode - the last dreamt up report I saw claimed that PKK were moving from Syria to Iraq and into Armenia to fight against Azeris - and people are buying it, as they always do. Nationalism is very big in Turkey. There's a reason why criticising a military campaign is considered a crime!

I was tempted to think that this 'conflict' would go the way of every other contrived foreign policy foray this year, but Aliyev and Erdogan may be out to save each other's political lives here in which case we need to consider what they're fighting to defend - very wealthy authoritarian 'mafia states'. I do not think that Turkey would decide to push Russia too far unless it had NATO or US backing because Turkey's economy and regional influence are very dependent on Russia. So, I think this will be a limited show-piece that may score some territory. What is certain is that in both Turkey and Azerbaijan, victory is already guaranteed by the media! Does that imply a short 'conflict'?

Another aspect to remember is Iran. it has very good and important relations with both Azerbaijan and Armenia and would no doubt fully back any Russian intervention be it diplomatic or otherwise. It has also offered to mediate between the two. The Nagorno-Karabakh area is very important to Iran.

gottlieb , Sep 29 2020 19:47 utc | 13
So many fuses, so little time with desperate madmen on the march. As the good professor said, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." WWIII ain't your grandfather's World War.
Orage , Sep 29 2020 20:05 utc | 14
R.A.
The swprs has been a constant source of Covid-19 scepticism from the outset. It is not balanced and is full of cherry picking about its sources and analysis. It is a very serious error to focus entirely on mortality in Covid 19 and its major effect on older people. It does mean premature death for many. But even more seriously Covid-19 causes serious morbidity and together with a high infectious rate leads to very sharp swamping of health systems, major loss of front line workers because of illness and serious health and economic effects independent of the mortality. Focussing on mortality of elderly only is a narrow view and ignores why Covid 19 is such a serious pandemic.
Et Tu , Sep 29 2020 20:08 utc | 15
Was lacking some of the details and depth of B's report but it was clear Erdogan is running point on another Nato led shit sandwich on Russia's doorstep and a blatant 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' trap laid out for Putin.

What's the bet if Russia supports Armenia the media will paint this as 'Russian aggression' on poor Azerbaijan and an invasion of their sovereign territory? The region is technically still part of Azerbaijan. Yet when all the first videos showed Azeri drones striking Armenian tanks in defensive dugouts, while Armenian footage showed ATGM's striking Azeri armour maneuvering in open fields, it doesn't take a genius to work out who the aggressor was... but facts should never get in the way of a good narrative when it comes to Nato..

Another frozen conflict would be just the ticket to drain more resources from Russia, not to mention, the potential for instability and refugees right on Iran's doorstep would be too much for the US not to want to invest in. Combine that with Erdogan's megalomania, and he'll be happy to add 15% on all munitions charged to Azerbaijan to help plug some of his budget holes, no doubt.

Luckily I'm no military strategist, but when i hear things like this i can't help wonder if some good old 'domestic terrorism' or missiles flying into Baku, Washington or Istanbul are just what is needed for these psychopaths to be brought to the negotiating table nice and early and avoid a lot of human misery... It is just crazy to think we have leaders who actually start wars in order to poke Russia in the eye... one wonders, since they know exactly who is doing what and why, what sort of payback that may bring one day.

Debsisdead , Sep 29 2020 20:16 utc | 16
There is no doubt that Nagorno-Karabakh is traditionally part of Azerbaijan and only got claimed by Armenia after a surfeit of Armenians invaded the territory since the end of WW1. All in all a very similar situation to that which developed in Serbia vis a vis the invasion of Kosovo by Albanians.
MOA has consistently stood against the internationally illegal Kosovo enclave, so why the contradiction with Nagorno-Karabakh?

Surely it cannot be because of ideological reasons i.e. Armenia is 'good guys' & Azerbaijan are bad guys? That is precisely the type of logical inconsistency which causes wars.
Azerbaijan is in a tough enough situation with Armenia block the creation of a contiguous nation with Armenia's takeover of the south of Azerbaijan up to the Iranian border. If you look at the first map provided you will see an unlabelled black blob up against the Iranian border a part of Azerbaijan which has been deliberately isolated by Armenia from the rest of Azerbaijan.

This report sounds like something out of the NYT or Guardian next you'll be claiming with zero evidence that there are Turkey funded terrorists brought in from Idlib just as the guardian has been claiming.

Jen , Sep 29 2020 20:28 utc | 17
Another motivation for Ottoman Sultan wannabe Erdogan may be the possibility of extending Turkish influence (and by implication his and his family's) through Azerbaijan and the Caspian Sea into Central Asia all the way to and into ... Xinjiang in NW China, with the potential for Uyghur terrorists, nurtured by Turkish propaganda, money and arms, to get a free ride through Central Asia and straight into any future conflict zones Turkey might want to open up in Iranian Azerbaijan and all Iran's northern and eastern border areas with Turkmenistan and Afghanistan.

Of course this will have US, UK, EU (possibly) and Israeli blessing if it means Turkey will have to do most of the heavy lifting of money transactions.

james , Sep 29 2020 20:33 utc | 18
thanks b.... seeing erdogan involved here makes sense.. at some point, someone is going to take him out to bring peace back to the area.... until then he is a useful tool..

@ debs....thanks for your comments.. perhaps b will respond to them?? i agree with et tu, the narrative the msm will spin here will tell us a lot..

AtaBrit , Sep 29 2020 20:38 utc | 19
@Jen
If I remember rightly, and I'll try to find the reports, it was claimed back in July that Erdogan had offered to send Syrian militias to help defend Azerbaijan.
What makes you think the claim is unfounded?
The jihadists left in N.Syria are a serious problem for Turkey, so it would nake perfect sense to try to 'liquidate' them in contrived 'conflicts'.
albagen , Sep 29 2020 20:38 utc | 20
@ Debsisdead 16

When did that "invasion of Kosovo by Albanians" did happen? You seem so pretty sure of it that it makes me wonder if you are the creator of history itself, so you just invented it, and believe it.

waiting...

Altai , Sep 29 2020 20:38 utc | 21
@ptb

The solution would be to give back the adjacent territories that border Azerbaijan to Azerbaijan and maybe pay some kind of nominal compensation to the displaced in return for normalisation. They are to my knowledge much like parts of the buffer zone in Cyprus, full of abandoned towns and villages. (Some of which you can see tanks using for cover in the videos)

But the Caucuses are the Caucuses are grudges are grudges. Can't turn back the clock so it's all or nothing, one side loses and one side wins.

Then you have all the exclaves and enclaves to deal with, which ironically, haven't become an issue yet at all, probably because it would involve attacks on Armenia proper. Though there has already been one strike in Armenia proper of a bus that was set to carry Armenian solders.

alaff , Sep 29 2020 20:46 utc | 22
1. It is obvious that the current aggravation was not accidental, but prepared in advance.

2. Possible goals for Turkey:

> Anchoring Turkey in Azerbaijan - the creation of full-fledged turkish military bases.

> Inclusion of Azerbaijan in the Turkish orbit of influence (thesis "two countries - one nation", in which Turkey assumes supremacy) within the framework of the concept of neo-Ottomanism and (pseudo-)leadership of Turkey in the Turkic world.

> Economic goals and energy projects (Azerbaijani oil, gas) as part of the Turkish plan to turn the country into an energy supplier.

> Given the circumstances (Ukrainian black hole, Belarusian problem, coronavirus, spectacle with Navalny, threat to Nord Stream-2 etc), involve Russia in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, thereby tying Russia's hands in the Caucasus direction in order to act more freely and boldly in other theaters (the Mediterranean conflict with Greece, Syria, Libya...), given the problematic position of Turkey (simultaneous war on several fronts and the almost complete absence of assistants/allies). In this situation, the Nagorno-Karabakh leverage/'trump card' in the hands of Turkey would be useful for negotiations with Russia.

The latter assumption is probably the main one.

@Debsisdead, #16


There is no doubt that Nagorno-Karabakh is traditionally part of Azerbaijan

Funny.
Actually, this territory - Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as Armenia and Azerbaijan - have been the territory (or "property", if you will) of Russia for the last 200-250 years.
Richard Steven Hack , Sep 29 2020 21:12 utc | 23
Haven't bothered to follow this conflict at all so far. Thanks to b for providing his usual excellent context overview.
Tom , Sep 29 2020 21:21 utc | 24
Interesting historic fact. As long as the centre (USSR) held, the facts on the ground held, much like the other areas of conflicts in Georgia, Ukraine and Transnistria. With the end of the USSR, everything changed. This is what Putin meant when he called the breakup of the USSR as disaster. And NATO will continue to poke a stick at these vulnerabilities. Are the people of Armenia really that stupid that they see anything positive from joining NATO? Like that will protect them against Turkey. They can see how Greece is treated. Hopefully this conflict will put to bed any thought of Armenia being pried away from Russia.

Stalin's Legacy: The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict

Nagorno-Karabakh is a highly contested, landlocked region in the South Caucasus of the former Soviet Union. The present-day conflict has its roots in the decisions made by Joseph Stalin when he was the acting Commissar of Nationalities for the Soviet Union during the early 1920s. In April 1920, Azerbaijan was taken over by the Bolsheviks; Armenia and Georgia were taken over in 1921. To garner public support, the Bolsheviks promised Karabakh to Armenia. At the same time, in order to placate Turkey, the Soviet Union agreed to a division under which Karabakh would be under the control of Azerbaijan. With the Soviet Union firmly in control of the region, the conflict over the region died down for several decades.

https://adst.org/2013/08/stalins-legacy-the-nagorno-karabakh-conflict/

Vladimir , Sep 29 2020 21:27 utc | 25
As #12 seems to be implying as well, b is ignoring this region is the backyard of another regional powerhouse: Iran.

Any involvement from the US in Iran's backguard will be gladly countertargeted so that automatically means Turkey has very big ambitions to join this battle. This could very well end up in straight war if the diplomatic channels of mainly Russia are not effective enough..

Mackie , Sep 29 2020 22:15 utc | 26
@albagen

Kosovo Liberation Army ethnically cleansed the Serbs and others from Kosovo (with NATO help) and took over that territory. They are Albanians, no?

I see nothing wrong with what Debisdead's statement.

Jimmy , Sep 29 2020 22:56 utc | 27
Excellent insights on what is happening. Hang up the NWO scamdemic stuff.
conspiracy-theorist , Sep 29 2020 22:59 utc | 28
Posted by: Yul | Sep 29 2020 19:29 utc | 9

I've read somewhere that only English wankers call Iran "Persia". Iran lost those territories when the Turkic Qajar incompetents were ruling Iran (in a fashion).

It is informative to look into Qajar Iran. They somehow managed to take a Safavid (also Turkic) Iran from a fairly respectable state to the lowest state that Iran has likely been in its entire 3000+ year history. It is amazing what the Pahlavis managed to do to resurrect Iran in the short 50 turbulent years a Persian dynasty finally got to run Iran after centuries.

As to Sultan of Turkey making noises about Azar (Fire) PaadGaan (Guardians) being the homeland of the 'multi-faceted' spawn of the displaced Mongols of Turkistan, he can go and suck the Tsar of All Russians and Minions prick, again.

--

Interesting that "B" claims (without any proof whatsoever) that Russia intends to use Iran as a channel to transport arms to Armenia. Iran's media already has come out and has denied reports by "foreign media" to say such things. I guess that includes you, Moon Of Alabama.

--

Also interesting that the apparently very capable Turkish drone being used is not discussed here at Moon of Alabama. When did this place turn into the New York Times? What's next, B, a Pulitzer?

Since the bar keep is not sharing links to vidoes released by Azerbaijan's military showing multiple distinct drone hits on Armenian armour, then I won't either. But it is just a few clicks away.

--

Finally, this situation is a touchy one for Iran, aka as "Persia" amongst the wankers and related sorts. Will the "Muslim" revolutionaries, the children of Ayatollah cum Imam of "Persians" (lol) yet again choose infidels as waali, if they think this will permit them to warm the throne of Jamshid and the Hidden Imam and wisely rule and chart the destiny of "Persians"? The answer to that is answered by noting that no one has ever accused the Mullahs of "Persia" to be impractical men. Unholy, sure, some. But impractical, estaghforallah!

bevin , Sep 30 2020 0:17 utc | 29
"..Actually, this territory - Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as Armenia and Azerbaijan - have been the territory (or "property", if you will) of Russia for the last 200-250 years." alaff@22

A very good point. These countries have never been independent states. In 1918, under western influence, and led by mensheviks Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan formed the Trans-Caucasian Republic. My guess is that by the end of the Soviet era secularism dominated all three societies and religious disputes were largely forgotten.
One historical grudge very much alive is that of the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks, a century ago.

Debsisdead , Sep 30 2020 1:14 utc | 30
Sorry grump one, I just got back from my wednesday morning doctor's run where I pick up some locals from around the area & run them to the Drs in town.

I hope that this conflict won't get characterised as a religious conflict, because that isn't really what it is about.
Armenians fled east during WW1 in direct response to the genocidal attacks on Armenians by Turks, so that should be easy eh? Blame the Turks, but it isn't that easy because of the French & Englanders machinations when sequestering all the assets of the Ottoman empire.

Right the way through WW1 which was at heart a war over assets for empires, even the spark that lit the fuse was caused by the Austro-Hungarian Empire's lust for grabbing Serbia & including it in their repressive empire, all the politicians & bureaucrats to empire of the 'big' nations, spent a lot more time and energy divvying up their hoped for imperial gains, than they ever spent on concern about the generation of young men being forced through the meat grinders.

There were 3 big nations on the winning side France, England & Russia, yet Sykes Picot is a secret agreement between only two of the triumvirate. Many suppose this is because Russia pulled out of WW1 after the October revolution, that is not correct as this secret agreement was signed in May 1916, 18 months before the Bolshevik soviet uprising. England & France were doing the dirty on Russia even while the Tsar was the bossfella.

Perfidious Albion seems to be the one most responsible as it has always claimed that a similarly secret deal England made with Russia, unbeknownst to France had been completed. A deal whereby England would grab the oil rich Mesopotamia & all the rest of Arabian peninsular in return for Russia getting Constantinople and most of Anatolia.

That seems unlikely since England and France had already spilt the blood of 213,980 French, English Australian, New Zealand & Canadian troops on the Dardanelles in pursuit of an invasion and eventual takeover of Constantinople which england had begun planning since back in 1905! Long before WW1. Winston Churchill in particular had been advocating this for more than a decade because he wanted to deny Russia easy access to the mediterranean.
A lie was told to the fatally foolish Tsar - it was that the anglo-french invasion of southern Turkey was to be a distraction that would require Turkey & Germany/Austria to divert troops from the eastern front thereby relieving pressure on Imperial Russia's armies.

So what? How does that effect Nagorno-Karabakh? Well it does, because after england screwed up at the Dardanelles, they then encouraged Armenians to take up arms against the Ottomans, all the while knowing that despite promises to the contrary, if the Armenians came unstuck against the 'easybeat' Turks, there would be no way of helping the Armenians out.

That is what happened of course. Kemal Attaturk the bloke who had overseen Gallipoli & england's send off was sent to oversee the fight against Armenian guerillas and the Armenians got monstered, so fled eastwards some as far as into the mountains of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The situation is even more complicated by the fact that after WW1 ended and elites all over europe were crazed with anxiety about a 'red' takeover of Europe, 'the west' kicked up even more trouble. By financing a mob oops sorry, army, of so-called white russians to resist the USSR in the South Western Caucasus, it meant that the USSR was unable to exert full control of the region for nearly 5 years. This is why as Tom says at #24 it wasn't until 1921 that the Soviet Union could credibly promise Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia, a blatant bribe to encourage the warring parties to talk not shoot, but really it was more like 1923 when the USSR got total control of the region.

I point out the mess that previous interference has caused because it is vital that history not repeat itself in that regard. If it does, then all that will result will be a conflict held in abeyance for a time until it flares up again.

There are two issues people & geography, maybe the boss of Azerbaijan is an arsehole who is trying to get back onside with Azerbaijanis by cranking up a conflict that is close to the hearts of most citizens because every time they look at a map they are confronted by the injustice of their nation cleaved in two. His alleged arseholery does not diminish the genuine injustice Azerbaijanis feel in their bones.

That is one group of people, the other group are the relatively small number of Armenians squatting illegally on Azerbaijani land.
The easiest way to fix the geography & people issue is for those Armenians to be relocated into decent accommodation within Armenia and return Nagorno-Karabakh plus a land corridor that rejoins Azerbaijan once again.
It will be complex to resolve as there will also be an issue with Armenians who have occupied the space between the two parts of Azerbaijan, but however much it costs, that is bound to be less than the cost of airplanes, rockets & artillery shells that will be expended keeping the conflict bubbling away.

[Sep 29, 2020] Tensions between Turkey and Russia rise in Idlib following failed talks

Sep 29, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

ET AL September 27, 2020 at 9:38 am

Middle East Eye via Antiwar.com : Tensions between Turkey and Russia rise in Idlib following failed talks
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/syria-idlib-tensions-turkey-russia-talks-failed

Turkish officials are preparing for the worst case scenario as talks in Ankara made clear that Moscow doesn't want a new deal
####

This is a Turkey sympathetic piece but may be one reason for current events between Armenia and Azerbaidjan. As for Syria, Turkey has been claiming to keep the north/Idlib under control which is has until the last few weeks at it has used the previous time to reinforce its military presence ('observation posts') – vis Vinyard the Saker – and now claims it is not reponsible and its not fair that Russia reacts to attacks by its re-dressed (literally) jihadists. Turkey's preference is of course to do nothing despite the all the attacks, and that in itself explains a lot. Turkey is now publicly putting out its argument in advance that it is 'Russia wot broke the agreement' and thus 'we are not responsible for any of the consequences.' Erd O'Grand is due another significant spanking. Would he call NATO to his defense as he did before? Certainly. Will it happen? No. Not to mention his current intreagues around Cyprus and pissing of the French, Greeks and others. Trouble t'mill.

ET AL September 27, 2020 at 9:48 am

But here's a much better article again via Antiwar.com

AL Monitor: Turkey's military deterrence breaks down in Syria's last rebel stronghold
https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2020/09/turkey-syria-russia-idlib-escalation-inevitable-m4-highway.html

Despite Turkey's efforts to maintain the status quo in Idlib, a Russian-backed Syrian assault seems increasingly likely.
####

In short, Turkey has not kept up its side of the deal of bringing the rebels under control and the supposed opening and joint patrols of the M4 & M5 highways has been suspended by Russia because of the attacks by rebadged jihadis. Turkey has clearly used the agreement to simply buy time for another 'cunning plan' and as no interest in fulfiling the agreement with Russia. The latter's patience is almost gone.

[Sep 29, 2020] This nasty neocon Rachel MadCow

Notable quotes:
"... The DemoRats have never been a party dedicated to peace; the only ones thinking that are the walking bong-holes who assuage their cognitive dissonance by telling themselves that. Both the demorats and their willing accomplices 'across the aisle' have led us into constant war for nearly eight decades. Lilliputian Big enders and Little enders all. ..."
"... Screw the war mongers and the MIC. ..."
"... If you read the article, it's obvious that [neo]liberals/whores are the apogee of hypocrisy. ..."
"... Perpetual war is about $$$. It knows no party. Never has and never will. ..."
"... Yup. It's always about the money. ..."
Jan 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com
True Blue , 1 hour ago link

Feral, yes; rabid, absolutely; smart... not so much. Why is anyone surprised?

The DemoRats have never been a party dedicated to peace; the only ones thinking that are the walking bong-holes who assuage their cognitive dissonance by telling themselves that. Both the demorats and their willing accomplices 'across the aisle' have led us into constant war for nearly eight decades. Lilliputian Big enders and Little enders all.

AI Agent , 1 hour ago link

She's a good lying propagandist... but she's not brilliant. Smart? maybe. Brilliant? Cow flop has more shine than Madcow.

desertboy , 36 minutes ago link

Maybe he meant "brilliant manipulator" -- sometimes they have meant the same thing.

Throat-warbler Mangrove , 1 hour ago link

Get.Us (a). Out.Now

Screw the war mongers and the MIC.

BlackChicken , 1 hour ago link

If you read the article, it's obvious that [neo]liberals/whores are the apogee of hypocrisy.

richardsimmonsoftrout , 1 hour ago link

"they're likely to emerge from 2020 with not only smeared consciences, but four more years in the opposition."

"Smeared consciences"... that's rich, pretty sure the psychopaths don't have a conscience.

navy62802 , 1 hour ago link

Perpetual war is about $$$. It knows no party. Never has and never will.

holdbuysell , 1 hour ago link

Yup. It's always about the money. As Fitts would say, that screeching you hear is the cash flow drying up for the rentiers. The murdering of women and children be damned. Hillary's demonic cackle is but the grotesque cherry on top: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y

[Sep 28, 2020] No wonder Pompey and his friend Jeffries won't give up on Syria! No wonder

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Virtually every aspect of the Syrian opposition was cultivated and marketed by Western government-backed public relations firms, from their political narratives to their branding, from what they said to where they said it. ..."
Sep 28, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

"Western government-funded intelligence cutouts trained Syrian opposition leaders, planted stories in media outlets from BBC to Al Jazeera, and ran a cadre of journalists. A trove of leaked documents exposes the propaganda network."

"Leaked documents show how UK government contractors developed an advanced infrastructure of propaganda to stimulate support in the West for Syria's political and armed opposition.

Virtually every aspect of the Syrian opposition was cultivated and marketed by Western government-backed public relations firms, from their political narratives to their branding, from what they said to where they said it.

The leaked files reveal how Western intelligence cutouts played the media like a fiddle, carefully crafting English- and Arabic-language media coverage of the war on Syria to churn out a constant stream of pro-opposition coverage.

US and European contractors trained and advised Syrian opposition leaders at all levels, from young media activists to the heads of the parallel government-in-exile . These firms also organized interviews for Syrian opposition leaders on mainstream outlets such as BBC and the UK's Channel 4.

More than half of the stringers used by Al Jazeera in Syria were trained in a joint US-UK government program called Basma, which produced hundreds of Syrian opposition media activists.

Western government PR firms not only influenced the way the media covered Syria, but as the leaked documents reveal, they produced their own propagandistic pseudo-news for broadcast on major TV networks in the Middle East, including BBC Arabic, Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, and Orient TV .

These UK-funded firms functioned as full-time PR flacks for the extremist-dominated Syrian armed opposition. One contractor, called InCoStrat, said it was in constant contact with a network of more than 1,600 international journalists and "influencers," and used them to push pro-opposition talking points.

Another Western government contractor, ARK, crafted a strategy to "re-brand" Syria's Salafi-jihadist armed opposition by "softening its image ." ARK boasted that it provided opposition propaganda that "aired almost every day on" major Arabic-language TV networks."

"The Western contractor ARK was a central force in launching the White Helmets operation.

The leaked documents show ARK ran the Twitter and Facebook pages of Syria Civil Defense, known more commonly as the White Helmets.

ARK took credit for developing "an internationally-focused communications campaign designed to raise global awareness of the (White Helmets) teams and their life saving work."

ARK also facilitated communications between the White Helmets and The Syria Campaign , a PR firm run out of London and New York that helped popularize the White Helmets in the United States.

It was apparently "following subsequent discussions with ARK and the teams" that The Syria Campaign "selected civil defence to front its campaign to keep Syria in the news," the firm wrote in a report for the UK Foreign Office." thegreyzone

--------------

Using really basic intelligence analytic tools; Occam's Razor, Walks like a duck, Smileyesque back azimuth's, etc. it has been clear that the UK government has been deeply involved in sponsoring and influencing the Syrian/ jihadi opposition in that miserable country. The wide spread British Old Boys network of aspirants to the tradition of imperial manipulation has been visible just below the surface if you had eyes to look and a brain to think.

A lot of the money for this folly came right out of USAID.

pl

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/09/23/syria-leaks-uk-contractors-opposition-media/


ISL , 27 September 2020 at 04:03 PM

Dear Colonel agreed.

I object to the line in the article that they "played the media like a fiddle" - as it implies the mainstream media is a victim as opposed to willing accomplice.

The American public very strongly told Obama they didn't want another invasion and war in the middle east (red lines or not) so rather ineffective propaganda.

Moreover, I suspect that given the US public inattention to overseas events that do not involve much US blood (in places they can not find on a map). Today's mess would be where more or less the same if the entire IO had never happened - though maybe with less cynicism of US/UK gov'ts and media.

OTH, it is curious how well the British Old Boys network (and US) aligns with Israeli interests (and runs counter to US or British interests). Maybe grayzone will investigate that (impressive) IO campaign. I think a small country in the middle east played US and UK elites like a fiddle.

The Twisted Genius , 27 September 2020 at 04:48 PM

I've only given this article a cursory reading so far and it is clear that the Brits are going balls to the wall on the PSYOPS/perception management front. This campaign flows naturally from the strong material support for the Syrian "moderate rebels" provided by the US, the Brits and probably others for years. We may still be blowing up IS jihadis, but we're also supporting our own brand of jihadis around Al-Tanf, giving free hand to Erdogan's jihadis along the Turkish-Syrian border and doing our best to stymie R+6 efforts to crush the remaining jihadis and unite Syria.

The article focuses on the contractors role in PSYOP. I'm not sure if it mentions the British government's role in this. The GCHQ's Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) probably manages most of those contractors. The British Army also has the 77th Brigade. This brigade's slogan is: "behavioural change is our unique selling point". Gordon MacMillan, a reserve officer with the 77th Brigade, is now Twitter's head of editorial operations for the Middle East.
The 77th was formed in 2015 and subsumed the 15th Psychological Operations Group which was headed by Steve Tathan, who went on to head the defence division of SCL, the now defunct parent of Cambridge Analytica. I'm sure the 77th is capable of managing some of those contractors, as well. I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few of contractors were also reservists in the 77th.

I bet we're not letting the Brits have all the fun. The CIA Special Activities Center (formerly SAD) includes the Political Action Group for PSYOP, economic warfare and cyberwarfare. That dovetails nicely with what CENTCOM is doing in Syria. I knew some of those guys a while back. I remember scaring them with some of my own anarchist hacker rantings when I was penetrating those hackers.

Our Army has fours PSYOP groups brigade-sized), two active and 2 reserve. I would think they have advanced their methodology since I took the course at Bragg. For a few years, they were called military information support operations (MISO) groups rather than PSYOP groups. They have since reverted to their PSYOP name although their activities are referred to as MISO. I don't know what the difference is.

Babak makkinejad , 27 September 2020 at 05:10 PM

ISL

No, no, no.

There is no such small country as you describe in the Near East.

There is an self-disciplined proxy force masquerading as a state which is mostly funded by the United States to further the religious policies of the WASP Culture Continent.

It is no accident that in this context, the names of US and UK occur often in the same sentences; one declared a crusade to wrestle control of Plastine from Muslims, and the otber one carried out that crusade and escalated it.

That is also the reason that US cannot end the war over Palestine or leave Islamdom

(Oil, Geostrategic considerations, arms sales, Realpolitik are just pseudo-rationications to obscure the real war.)

Diana Croissant , 28 September 2020 at 07:45 AM

Where is Candide (aka Voltaire) when we need him?

BABAK MAKKINEJAD , 28 September 2020 at 09:14 AM

Ishmael Zechariah

How WASP-dom has arrived in this crusade is not, in my opinion, as significant as that it has been waging it for more than a hundred years.

fakebot , 28 September 2020 at 10:43 AM

"WASP Culture" is into golfing, not crusading. Erik Prince and the religious fundamentalists, maybe, but they don't drive US policy.

Russia and/or Chinese dominion over Eurasia cannot be permitted. Their means to achieve that would be less ethical, not that the US or UK have been prince among men and salts of the earth, as noted in the article.

The US has tried in vain to win over hearts and minds. It has been a mostly noble effort to bring countries like Iraq and Afghanistan into the 21st century, but it was always more of a losing game. The problem lies too much in Islam and tribal rivalries.

[Sep 28, 2020] I wonder if anybody here have considered a possibility that the neoliberal cabal now in power in the US wants to destroy the standard of living of common people and eliminate all social protections of the New Deal, living in place for the police state and oversized the military

Recruiting for military is much easier if there is no jobs.
Notable quotes:
"... They want to eliminate the EPA, vacate the State Dept and many other Depts, except for a few high-placed cronies, wipe all financial, labour, consumer and environmental regulations off the books; eliminate or reduce to a bare minimum federal health insurance, medicaid, medicare and Social Security, crush public education, privatize everything they can sell, and so on. They are not in power to "govern" but to destroy government. This is all being done with a fairly unified agenda: to free "the market" from any restrictions whatsoever, so that they -- global elites -- can make as much money as possible. It's a cabal of global corporations, militarists, Christian sovereign white supremacists, fossil fuel giants and bankers ..."
Sep 28, 2020 | peterturchin.com

Shaun Bartone February 27, 2017 at 3:47 pm

I wonder if any of the commentators here have considered that the [neoliberal] cabal now in power in the US (not elsewhere) are not in power to "take power" except for a temporary period. They don't want to run the federal government, they want to destroy it, except for the police state and the military.

They want to eliminate the EPA, vacate the State Dept and many other Depts, except for a few high-placed cronies, wipe all financial, labour, consumer and environmental regulations off the books; eliminate or reduce to a bare minimum federal health insurance, medicaid, medicare and Social Security, crush public education, privatize everything they can sell, and so on. They are not in power to "govern" but to destroy government. This is all being done with a fairly unified agenda: to free "the market" from any restrictions whatsoever, so that they -- global elites -- can make as much money as possible. It's a cabal of global corporations, militarists, Christian sovereign white supremacists, fossil fuel giants and bankers , and I think there's a high degree of cooperation for the agenda. The revolution is the cabal run by Trump/Bannon who are more extreme and ideological than any previous faction, who have no tolerance for compromise. They have an apocalyptic vision of grinding it all down to a bare minimum police state.

[Sep 27, 2020] Azerbaijani Army And Syrian Jihadis Launch Attack On Armenian Lines

Sep 27, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Moon of Alabama Brecht quote " In Which We Debunk A Covidiot Pamphlet | Main | The MoA Week In Review - Open Thread 2020-77 " September 27, 2020 Azerbaijani Army And Syrian Jihadis Launch Attack On Armenian Lines

During the last weeks there was news that Turkey was hiring some 2,000 'Syrian rebels' to fight in Azerbaijan against Armenian forces which since 1993 occupy Nagorno- Karabakh . Earlier today the Azerbaijan forces and the mercenaries launched their attack on Armenian lines. It was a massacre. Two Azerbaijani helicopters were shot down. Some 10 tanks and armored troop transporters went up in flames . Azerbaijani artillery hit some civilian structures in Stepankert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh. Turkish(?) drones hit Armenia front positions .


bigger

The Azerbaijani tactic seems to be to bunch up a lot of their tanks in the open field and to wait for the Armenian artillery to destroy them. Russian troops are stationed in Armenia and additional heavy support from Russia was flown in today . But Russia is friendly with both countries and is already urging for an armistice. Armenia has mobilized its forces and reinforcements are moving towards the front.

This is now, after Syrian and Libya, the third country in which the wannabe Sultan of Turkey is trying to fight Russian supported forces. It ain't gonna work. But Erdogan has to keep on doing that as a domestic diversion because the Turkish economy has screeched to a halt. The recent central bank rate hike is unlikely to stop the loss of the Lira but will deepen the recession.

The situation might well escalated from here on. There will be a lot of disinformation coming from both sides.

Posted by b on September 27, 2020 at 12:55 UTC | Permalink


Josh , Sep 27 2020 13:19 utc | 1

Thanks B.
Biswapriya Purkayast , Sep 27 2020 14:03 utc | 2
Azerbaijan can't lift a finger without Ottoman backing. Armenia is traditionally a Russian ally, and even though the current regime is wooing Amerikastan, it can't survive without Russian protection. In any regular war Armenia will smash Azerbaijan flat but the Ottomans are guaranteed to get involved. Now Russia and the Ottomans are on different sides in Libya of course, Russia would back Greece in any conflict with Ankara, and increasingly Russia is getting fed up with Ottoman attempts to annex North Syria. I can only surmise that this is an Ottoman warning to Russia.
steven t johnson , Sep 27 2020 14:24 utc | 3
The claim the Azeri tanks were just sitting in a field waiting to be smashed by Russian artillery etc. actually sounds like the Russians attacking first. The aggressor usually has the initiative and thus usually has operational success in the opening round. It's theoretically possible that a Russian artillery offensive was on high alert, waiting to launch after a suitable "incident" which could be represented as an Azeri assault. Whatever the value of mercenaries from a losing war, a few weeks is very unlikely to permit meaningful incorporation into an actual fighting force. Therefore it is highly unlikely that their reinforcement was the enabling cause of an Azeri assault.

It is a strange and marvelous world, where wonders delightful and horrible abound. So it is barely possible the Azeris are terminally stupid, the underlying theory of the post. I would still say that it's *not* because non-Christians are stupid. More likely it's because the Azeris are getting their military advice from their friends the Russians.

R Rose , Sep 27 2020 14:30 utc | 4
@ # 2

"Armenia is traditionally a Russian ally"

Not so much anymore. It was the National Endowment for Democracy and George Soros Foundation that brought Armenia's most recent leader to power.


b "This is now, after Syrian and Libya, the third country in which the wannabe Sultan of Turkey is trying to fight Russian supported forces."

rubbish

H.Schmatz , Sep 27 2020 14:33 utc | 5
Thread on the reignitied conflict, IMO too coincidental with soon coming outcome of US elections..

https://twitter.com/descifraguerra/status/1310123197111689218

IMO this reigniting of an old conflict comes as response to recent Kavkas 2020 maneuvers organized by Russia which are taking place right now, with the participation of Armenia, and also as response of last meeting between Zarif and Lavrov, in whose presser Lavrov was quite explicit, at least more than before...

This comes, in the first place, as a new hot front ( apart from Belarus ) in the post-Soviet space to implicate Russia and make her choose amongst two neighbors she gets along with quite well, and at the same time, the transport of Syrian jihadi mercenary forces in a charter flight by Turkey imply that a new abcess the size and type of Idlib is planned to be inserted in the viccinity of both Russia and Iran, which will act as destablization force for future incursions after US elections...

As we talk Azerbaijan is announcing advances in the Southern front and the take over of some localities along Iranian border ...Why? What that has to do with Armenia? To implant there the jihadis for the coming "proxy war" on Iran, the same way they were implanted in Syria/Turkey northern East and West border and Syria/Lebanon Southern border...
Turkey here acting as US proxy PMC to position US managed and funded jihadi forces, as it has done in Syria and Lybia...

https://twitter.com/descifraguerra/status/1310165201073954816

https://twitter.com/descifraguerra/status/1310187962135609344

Also the conflict comes to shoot two, or three, birds with the same shot by starting another military conflict or destabilization process in the Silk & Road path...

This is the US MIC reasuring their rate of profit for the coming US presidency by extending the perpetual war...

Although may well be that they will not even wait for the elections results...

Is Steven Bannon Still Advising Trump? U.S. President Leads the Country Into Dangerous Waters With Latest Iran Move

H.Schmatz , Sep 27 2020 14:56 utc | 6
On the importance of this new conflict and its obvious connection with Iran...See map in thread linked above...Some more sources...Probable objective of past "color revolution" in Armenia...on the grounds of "alleged" US chaotic state...chaos in the US acts as veil for its own population ( so as thvey can not think of continuously started wars while they cop with the immeidate miserable oticome of the pandemic...) and for opponents... who may think of relaxing...Fortunately, Gerasimov, and IRGC, are always attentive...
THE SECOND WAR OF THE NAGORNO-KARABAJ HAS BREAKED In red the disputed region, in the center of which is Stefankert, the capital. In blue the areas supposedly conquered by #Azerbaiyan.

Everything indicates that the Azeri offensive began by surprise in the early hours of today, and has maintained a reasonable pace of advance

https://twitter.com/Political_Room/status/1310189589521403908

On the visible hand of Turkey in this reginition...no way Turkey is moving without NATO consent...and even support...recall "international coalition of the willing to fight ISIS in Syria"...which then turned into ISIS proxy war onto Syrian state and population...

I have been checking and Azerbaijan announced in June that they were interested in buying TB2 from Turkey. In no way have they been able to buy, receive and put the drones into operation in such a short time. It starts to get cloudy.

Twitter turco está diciendo abiertamente que son sus drones. Mientras Clash Report, que ya se ha comentado muchas veces que podría estar ligada a la inteligencia truca (por el acceso que tienen a cierto material informativo) habla de que los drones son Bayraktar TB2.

https://twitter.com/DragonLadyU2/status/1310186956475830272

Shooting is common in Upper Karabakh...but not in Down Karabakh...this conflict as part of war on Russian gas supply to Europe...

Although shooting is common in Upper Karabakh, a disputed area between Armenia and Azerbaijan, this is the fastest escalation in recent times. Just hours after the last incident, Armenia has declared martial law and total mobilization.

Let's not think that this is simply a local conflict between two countries: Azerbaijan is backed by Turkey, while Armenia is backed by Russia. And to this we can add the natural gas that comes to Europe from the Caspian.

https://twitter.com/elOrdenMundial/status/1310140310815731712

In case someone wants to follow, Youtube channel of Armenian TV which sometimes biradcast in Englisgh language...

In case anyone is interested in following him from the origin, YouTube channel with a live signal from an Armenian television (at times they speak in English)

https://twitter.com/carola1292/status/1310150136236998657


H.Schmatz , Sep 27 2020 15:07 utc | 7
@Posted by: H.Schmatz | Sep 27 2020 14:56 utc | 6

Well, sorry, posting too fast, as I must go now, and without time to check two times...
It seems that tweets by #DragonLadyU2 got middle trnaslated...Repost correctly and with blockquote, as it is not, as it could seem by the size of letter, info of mine, but of this account who is following the issue of Azerbaijani drones purchase...

I was introducing it as:

On the visible hand of Turkey in this reginition...no way Turkey is moving without NATO consent...and even support...recall "international coalition of the willing to fight ISIS in Syria"...which then turned into ISIS proxy war onto Syrian state and population...

I have been checking and Azerbaijan announced in June that they were interested in buying TB2 from Turkey. In no way have they been able to buy, receive and put the drones into operation in such a short time. It starts to get cloudy.

Turkish Twitter is openly saying that it is their drones. While Clash Report, which has already been commented many times that it could be linked to Turkish intelligence (due to the access they have to certain informative material), talks about the drones being Bayraktar TB2.

https://twitter.com/DragonLadyU2/status/1310186956475830272

H.Schmatz , Sep 27 2020 15:32 utc | 8
On preparations for this conflict, and who provoked whom...also reflected some intends of transforming this inot religious conflict...which then would reginite the whole Caucasus and Caspian region, and thus would end implying Iran and Russia...and probably palcing them in different sides...which could be one of the objectives, to put a breach into very good Russian/Iranian relations...Beware...
I'm reminded Israeli bizjet associated w secret flights was in Baku, Azerbaijan 3 days ago. Landed back in Israel along w Azeri ministry of defense cargo

https://twitter.com/avischarf/status/1310212966177009665

Now is when certain things start to make sense, airlift of Turkish military cargo planes bound for Azerbaijan on the 24th.

https://twitter.com/DragonLadyU2/status/1310201238403907584


Interesting thread on the preparations for the shipping of jihadis...on preparations time ago..( no idea baout this source I cathed over there...)

https://twitter.com/Elizrael/status/1310164366097027072

I have not been able to verify the arrival of Syrian fighters from the Turkish-backed factions (SNA) in Azerbaijan as of now. I can confirm that dozens of fighters from NW Syria (outside of regime control) left Syria via Turkey in an unknown direction about a week ago.

Families lost touch with these men since their departure. Rumored destinations include Azerbaijan, Qatar, Turkey and Libya. I am in touch with families & friends of men who left and will report once they manage to get in touch with their loved-ones.

About a month ago, rumors spread on WhatsApp among SNA fighters that they can register to go to Azerbaijan. Many registered over WhatsApp, others apparently thru offices in the Turkish-controlled areas.
The fighters registered due to the enticing rumored salaries of $2K-$2.5K

The SNA mercenaries who've gone to fight in Libya against Haftar were recruited with direct involvement by Turkish officers who met with commanders of the SNA factions to pressure them to send fighters. With the alleged Azerbaijan recruitment, there haven't been such meetings.

It seems likely that the recruitment is being carried out by a Turkish private security company that is also involved in shipping Syrians to fight in Libya. There is no need to apply pressure on Syrians to leave anymore. The number of men wanting to go far exceeds demand.

With time, the idea of being deployed oversees as a mercenary is becoming more socially acceptable in Syria, in both communities residing outside of regime control (men in Idlib have registered to go to Azerbaijan too) and in regime areas (where men are going to fight for Haftar)

Syrian lives are regarded as expendable, with Syria serving as an arena to settle geostrategic scores at Syrians' expense. Syrians resisted & still resist this logic, but the collapse of the economy is prompting many Syrians to be willing to sell themselves to the highest bidder.


div> I think that Jihadists have no nationality, therefore it is wrong to label them as "Syrian"!

Posted by: padre , Sep 27 2020 15:47 utc | 9

I think that Jihadists have no nationality, therefore it is wrong to label them as "Syrian"!

Posted by: padre | Sep 27 2020 15:47 utc | 9

H.Schmatz , Sep 27 2020 16:22 utc | 10
@Posted by: padre | Sep 27 2020 15:47 utc | 9

Indeed, that is a multinational proxy force, sometimes recruited in Gulf monarchies jails...

Attention also to the restarting of jihadi attacks in the land of Petit Napoleon...second from some days ago...

ptb , Sep 27 2020 16:40 utc | 11
some confused comments

(1) re: tanks bunched up - the linked Armenian MOD twitter-video with the cheesy music and 2 tank hits ( this one ) suggests it is not artillery? Recently dug cover beind them, but tanks mostly facing toward camera. Bulldozer still there. Direct hits. You can see from the reaction of the tanks what they think is the direction from which they were attacked. After the first hit, the next tank to be hit attempted (unsuccessfully) to hide behind the remains of the tank already destroyed. The others which were not already facing that way, turn their turrets toward the camera, which is the direction from which they think they were attacked. They start making smokescreen as the clip ends.

(2) We really don't need to see a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

(3) I don't really get the geopolitics of this. For Turkish strategic motivations, the relevant oil/gas pipeline does not pass thru the contested territory although is quite close. Not sure what to make of that. Map here , with Nagorno-Karabakh colored in under Azerbaijan. Turkey is in danger of being bypassed by Greece-Cyprus-Israel pipeline, how does this this help them in any way?

(4) For US-Iran conflict, just seems like general chaos. Perhaps there is a land route from Russia-Georgia-Iran, but it can't be as good as the caspian sea route.

(5) for Greece-Cyprus pipeline, there may be a commercial benefit, if the reliability of the Azerbaijan-Turkey route comes into question due to war or instability.

vk , Sep 27 2020 17:00 utc | 12
@ Posted by: ptb | Sep 27 2020 16:40 utc | 11

Looks like Turkey has gone rogue. Since the 2016 assassination attempt, Erdogan doesn't trust NATO anymore.

As for (3), it's very straightforward: Turkey probably wants some symmetrical leverage against Russia against the FUBARed situation in Idlib (which is draining Turkish coffers and soldiers). They are probably very desperate, and are looking for something on these lines: "look, Russia, you give us Idlib and we let Nagorno-Karabakh alone the next day. Deal?".

steven t johnson , Sep 27 2020 17:28 utc | 13
The Azeris making advances is to be expected if they had the aggressor's initiative. The post implies the Armenians are winning handily, which is not to be expected when a prepared Azeri offensive kicks off.
Ken Garoo , Sep 27 2020 17:30 utc | 14
Armenia has long been on the US Regime Change hitlist - June/July 2015, July 2017, April 2018 when the Random Guy Pashinyan was imposed as leader. He has the tricky task of balancing the demands of his owners versus the reality of Armenian interests.
p>

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[Sep 27, 2020] Neoliberalisn means war: two neoliberal state clash in disputed Nagono-Karabakh: Armenia Orders 'Full Troop Mobilization' Against Azerbaijan As Tanks Clash, Martial Law Declared

So a NATO member -- Turkey is supporting Azerbaijan while Russia supports Armenia. Yet another proxy war?
Sep 27, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Sunday saw huge clashes erupt between the armies of Armenia and Azerbaijan along the already militarized and disputed Nagorno-Karabakh border region. An official state of war in the region has been declared by Yerevan.

"Early in the morning, around 7 a.m. the Azerbaijani forces launched a large-scale aggression, including missile attacks..." Armenia's Defense Ministry stated Sunday. Armenia has since reportedly declared martial law and a "total military mobilization" in what looks to be the most serious escalation between the two countries in years.

Tank warfare unfolding Sunday. Armenian Defense Ministry produced footage (still frame) of attack on Azeri positions.

Air and artillery attacks from both sides ramped up, with each side blaming the other for the start of hostilities, while international powers urge calm. Crucially, civilians have already been killed on either side by indiscriminate shelling . At least a dozen soldiers on either side have also been reported killed.

Armenia's high command has ordered all troops throughout the country to muster and report to their bases : "I invite the soldiers appointed in the forces to appear before their military commissions in the regions," a statement said.

Armenia's military has released footage of significant tank warfare in progress. The below is said to be Armenian army forces destroying Azerbaijani tanks:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/-mJffVrtPLk

And here's more from Sunday's fighting:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/D2jd1bw0AXQ?start=9

The recent conflict hearkens back to 2016, but before that to post-Soviet times. Christian Armenia and Muslim Azerbaijan fought a war at that time in which at least 200 people were killed over Armenian ethnic breakaway Nagorno Karabakh, which declared independence in 1991, despite being internationally recognized as within Azerbaijan territory .

me title=

The first war for the territory finished in 1994, but the region has been militarized since, amid sporadic shelling.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1310227591031332864&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Farmenia-declares-war-martial-law-effect-tank-warfare-azerbaijan-erupts-disputed&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=219d021%3A1598982042171&width=550px

Dozens of civilians have already been injured Sunday in the major flare-up of fighting, as CNN reports :

While Armenia said it was responding to missile attacks launched by its neighbor Sunday, Azerbaijan blamed Armenia for the clashes.

In response to the alleged firing of projectiles by Azerbaijan, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan tweeted that his country had "shot down 2 helicopters & 3 UAVs, destroyed 3 tanks."

Multiple dramatic battlefield videos are circulating on social media confirming the large-scale deployment of tanks, artillery units, and airpower . Multiple Azerbaijani soldiers have been reported killed, but it's as yet unclear what casualty numbers could be.

Turkey's role in new fighting is attracting scrutiny. Its foreign ministry blamed Armenia and called for it to halt military operations, however, it hardly appears to be a mere outside or 'neutral' observer, given new widespread reports Turkey has transferred 'Syrian rebel' units to join the fighting on Azerbaijan's side .

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-1&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1310192700184985600&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Farmenia-declares-war-martial-law-effect-tank-warfare-azerbaijan-erupts-disputed&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=219d021%3A1598982042171&width=550px

These reports of Turkish supplied Syrian mercenaries began days ago, in what regional analysts predicted would be a huge escalation in hostilities in the Caucuses.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan late in the day slammed Turkey's meddling in the conflict . Ankara had called Armenia "an obstacle" to peace after the fresh hostilities broke out. Yerevan has now formally confirmed Turkey is supplying fighters .

Via BBC

Given the number of vital oil and gas infrastructure facilities and pipelines in the region , impact on global markets could be seen as early as Monday.

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"At least 16 military and several civilians were killed on Sunday in the heaviest clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan since 2016, reigniting concern about stability in the South Caucasus, a corridor for pipelines carrying oil and gas to world markets," Reuters reports.

Azerbaijan has also declared an official state of martial law while clashes between the armies are unfolding.

Meanwhile footage has emerged showing Armenia's nationwide mustering of its national and reserve forces :

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Unverified footage of frontline fighting into the night:

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-4&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1310273042929590274&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Farmenia-declares-war-martial-law-effect-tank-warfare-azerbaijan-erupts-disputed&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=219d021%3A1598982042171&width=550px

"Pipelines shipping Caspian oil and natural gas from Azerbaijan to the world pass close to Nagorno-Karabakh," Reuters reports. "Armenia also warned about security risks in the South Caucasus in July after Azerbaijan threatened to attack Armenia's nuclear power plant as possible retaliation ."

The fighting is expected to grow fiercer along front lines in the disputed region into the night as the prospect of a full 'state of war' is looming between the historic rivals.


[Sep 26, 2020] What is predatory capitalism

Highly recommended!
Sep 26, 2020 | www.amazon.com

Extracted from: From Conflict to Crisis- The Danger of U.S. Actions by Jeanne M. Haskin

CHAPTER TWO: INSTILLING THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE

Selfishness may be exalted as the root and branch of capitalism, but it doesn't make you look good to the party on the receiving end or those whose sympathy he earns. For that, you need a government prepared to do four things, which each have separate dictums based on study, theorization, and experience. Coercion: Force is illegitimate only if you can't sell it. Persuasion: How do I market thee? Let me count the ways. Bargaining: If you won't scratch my back, then how about a piece of the pie? Indoctrination: Because I said so. (And paid for the semantics.)

Predatory capitalism is the control and expropriation of land, labor, and natural resources by a foreign government via coercion, persuasion, bargaining, and indoctrination.

At the coercive stage, we can expect military and/or police intervention to repress the subject populace. The persuasive stage will be marked by clientelism, in which a small percentage of the populace will be rewarded for loyalty, often serving as the capitalists' administrators, tax collectors, and enforcers. At the bargaining stage, efforts will be made to include the populace, or a certain percentage of it, in the country's ruling system, and this is usually marked by steps toward democratic (or, more often, autocratic) governance.

At the fourth stage, the populace is educated by capitalists, such that they continue to maintain a relationship of dependency.

The Predatory Debt Link

In many cases, post-colonial states were forced to assume the debts of their colonizers. And where they did not, they were encouraged to become in debt to the West via loans that were issued through international institutions to ensure they did not fall prey to communism or pursue other economic policies that were inimical to the West. Debt is the tie that binds nation states to the geostrategic and economic interests of the West.

As such, the Cold War era was a time of easy credit, luring postcolonial states to undertake the construction of useless monoliths and monuments, and to even expropriate such loans through corruption and despotism, thereby making these independent rulers as predatory as colonizers. While some countries were wiser than others and did use the funds for infrastructural improvements, these were also things that benefited the West and particularly Western contractors. In his controversial work Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins reveals that he was a consultant for an American firm (MAIN), whose job was to ensure that states became indebted beyond their means so they would remain loyal to their creditors, buying them votes within United Nations organizations, among other things.

Predatory capitalists demand export-orientations as the means to generate foreign currency with which to pay back debt. In the process, the state must privatize and drastically slash or eliminate any domestic subsidies which are aimed at helping native industry compete in the marketplace. Domestic consumption and imports must be radically contained, as shown by the exchange rate policies recommended by the IMF. The costs of obtaining domestic capital will be pushed beyond the reach of most native producers, while wages must be depressed to an absolute bare minimum. In short, the country's land, labor, and natural resources must be sold at bargain basement prices in order to make these goods competitive, in what one author has called "a spiraling race to the bottom," as countries producing predominantly the same goods engage in cutthroat competition whose benefactor is the West.

Under these circumstances, foreign investment is encouraged, but this, too, represents a loaded situation for countries that open their markets to financial liberalization.

[Sep 24, 2020] Antifa Conspiracy Theories and America's Unraveling by Nickolas Kristof

Antifa and BLM are just shows with stunts designed to distract people from the level they are fleeced by MIC and financial oligarchy. As well as restore the legitimacy of Clinton wing of neoliberal oligarchy which was badly shaken during 2016 election, when their candidate was send packing.
Nicholas Kristof is member of "Clinton gang of neoliberals" and a part of this effort to distract people. The number of people who pay attention to Nicholas Kristof bloviations is astounding. Few understand that we do not know the facts and the real issue if the tight grip of MIC and financial oligarchy on the society. What is interesting is that s in California, there are 8.5 million residents born outside the country and about 150,000 homeless. "The melting pot burned over. It is now a ... salad.
For example, if money spend on wars were used to manage thoseforests with difficult terrain and perioc drauts, would the outcome be different?
Can those fires and destruction be viewed as God punishment for war the USA unleashed? As Thomas Jefferson said "I tremble for my country when I consider that God is just."
BTW, the number of commenters with Russian paranoia symptom is frightening. Of course NYT attracts specific audience, but still. In this sense NYT columnists including Nickolas Kristof are just warmongering bottom feeders of MIC crumps. It is pathetic how he tries to hide the lack of money for forest management and mismanagement if this issue by Oregon Dem politician under the broad banner of "climate change" Existence of climate change does not mean that fire should burn uncontrollably.
MIC steals half trillion dollars and then financial oligarchy steals probably another half, if not more. What is left is not enough for proper maintenance of land, water and environment in general. Stupid situation, but this is neoliberalism my friend, where "greed is good". And people chose this mousetrap themselves in 1970th by electing first Carter and then Reagan and then Clinton , allowing financial oligarchy to dismantle New Deal Capitalism. Clinton presidency was especially destructive, In a way he should be views as the top villain in this story, a real criminal boss.
Below I selected only more or less sane comment (which constitute probably less 1% of the total)
Notable quotes:
"... How about a judicious Forrest management? ..."
"... So much for our useless 750 Billion dollar military budget. ..."
"... Amazing how ,close minded people become when, for them, everything is political. ..."
Sep 24, 2020 | www.nytimes.com


Dr B
San Diego Sept. 20

Wouldn't the conspiracy theories and concerns about antifa be lessened if progresses were as vitriolic about violence committed in the name of equity, diversity and inclusion as they are about violence committed in support of MAGA? Would the right have anything to crow about if the NYT was as critical of physical altercations caused by social justice warriors as they are of white supremacists? Wouldn't we all have more trust in MSM if they investigated the facts before accusing Nick Sandman of racism or claiming a garbage pull was a noose? One sided reporting and editorials like these fan the flames rather than squelch them.

Ralphie
CT Sept. 20
It's amazing. You can write a column in the NY Times full of conspiracy theories -- all fully believed by the left -- and accuse the right of being prone to believing conspiracy theories. From Russia - collusion to rubes in the red states --a majority of dems share a set of beliefs that are as delusional as anything a small group on the right might believe. But, that's Kristof and the Ny Times for you.

Richard
Vermont Sept. 20
People seemed to have lost a sense of what is plausible. While few of us know the news first hand, we have to both trust and evaluate what is reported. Nothing is absolute. Jurors are asked to decide cases beyond a reasonable doubt. That is how I feel taking in the news. But within that sliver of doubt, within the fact that nothing is absolute is where conspiracy theories begin to fester. It is where some have found solace to confirm what they want to choose to believe despite how much there might be to question that. Events like this create an opportunism to demonize those you hate and in doing so the essence of what we should be debating is lost. How to prevent these fires in the first place? We will probably continue to debate it despite the evidence on climate change, whether there is a deep state trying to discredit Trump, whether the seriousness of covid is a hoax. Yes there is no absolute certainty but there is taking an educated guess as opposed to an emotional response. I'll go with the educated guess. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, I will say it is a duck and accept that sliver of possibility I might be wrong.

Neel Krishnan
Brooklyn, NY Sept. 20
The social fabric has unraveled, y'all pundits need to catch up.
Steve Fankuchen Oakland, CA Sept. 20
Why do people attach themselves to "conspiracy theories?" It's actually quite simple. Take QAnon for example: it is functionally just another religion competing for adherents. As with any religion, it offers its believers an explanation of what they deem is wrong while offering a path to right those wrongs. Certainty and simplicity: those are the essential elements of cults/religion/bumpersticker politics. And the internet guarantees that whatever you believe will be "validated." "Conspiracy theories" are, for the most part, not theories, merely assertions. A theory is subject to proof and disproof by evidence. In a world where truth has no inherent monetary value, don't expect it. Why the rapid spread? To paraphrase Bill Clinton, "It's the internet, Stupid!" Follow the money: Agenda + Clickbaitability = Profit That is the business model of the internet, a medium where "news" is whatever will produce the most clicks. As in profit. Unless and until the youngest generation developes a means of communication that does not depend on megacorporations, nothing will change. In the Sixties, a generation which disbelieved and had no honest access to the traditional media, created its own, the "alternative press." Hopefully, today's teenagers will develope their own way to communicate that is reliable. It is 100% guaranteed that if their "opposition" becomes an actual threat to the profits of Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, and the rest of their ilk, they will be cut off.
RP NYC Sept. 20
The antifa movement has grown since the 2016 United States presidential election. As of August 2017, approximately 200 groups existed, of varying sizes and levels of activity.[73] It is particularly present in the Pacific Northwest.[74] Wikipedia
Mark Nuckols Moscow Sept. 20
Well, Americans are notoriously gullible.

Steve Griffith
Oakland, CA Sept. 20
In an age when the US Justice Department is anything but just, more closely resembling something akin to "just us," I call to mind Thomas Jefferson, in a somewhat different context: "I tremble for my country when I consider that God is just."
The Poet McTeagle California Sept. 20
We spend hundred of billions of dollars every year on the types of weapons that won WWII, while the real threat to our Republic and yes, our civilization, is ,,, It's funny and tragic, simultaneously.
Sigmond C. Monster Point Magu Sept. 20
Antifa has done a lot of things. They have chosen to step into the arena. Whether they did it or not, this is accusation is a result of wading into the fight. If Antifa doesnt like to be accused of things and cant handle it, then Antifa should step off. Or does Antifa only want praise? Because that isnt going to happen. Many people dont like Antifa nor trust Antifa. And rightfully so. Ask any career criminal how many times they've been wrongfully accused of something. If an individual or group doesnt want to be accused of things, then dont get involved from the start.
Larry Klein Walnut Creek Ca Sept. 20
When people are uneducated, they do not understand what is happening around them. So they make up explanations to calm their uncertainty...
JQGALT Philly Sept. 20
Except that about a dozen people have been arrested and charged with starting the forest fires. Shouting "without evidence!" doesn't make it so. Facts matter.

Andy
MD Sept. 20
@JQGALT There are always people who are setting fires whether accidentally or intentionally. Do you have any proof that these arsonists were politically motivated I any way ?
99percent downtown Sept. 20
Why does NYT bend over to support Antifa? Kristof's 2nd headline should be changed to: "Absolute Defense of Antifa is a symptom of a deeper unraveling, and a sign of danger ahead." We know for a fact: BLM/Antifa destroyed thousands of buildings across the country in the last 90 days. Literally thousands. Minneapolis alone lost 700: https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2020/06/16/minneapolis-issues-map-showing-extent-of-buildings-damaged-in-unrest-over-george-floyds-death / We know for a fact: At least 6 arsonists set fires in Oregon - one of which was the largest outbreak: https://www.oregonlive.com/wildfires/2020/09/rash-of-oregon-arson-cases-fuel-fear-conspiracy-theories-during-devastating-wildfires.html We are justified to assume: Other fires were set by arsonists, but were not caught. One man all alone with a pack of matches is hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt to be Antifa. But common sense supports what we believe in our own hearts: the individual radical arsonists are most likely Antifa. Why does NYT bend over to support Antifa? 9 Recommend Share
Thomas Shapley Washington State Sept. 20
Yet the Almeda fire in Oregon that destroyed more than 2,300 homes was, according to NYT reporting, caused by human activity and is subject of a "criminal investigation." Perhaps it would be wise to reserve total judgment until that investigation is completed.

Observer of the Zeitgeist
Middle America Sept. 20
Who needs rumors? The organization showed what it is made of when it created its free zone in downtown Seattle and had the highest crime and murder rate per capita in its short life in the country.

joe
atl Sept. 20
Rational people know that Antifa is not staring forest fires. However, burning and looting and using fireworks as weapons in the recent riots make even the dumbest claims of Trump supporters more believable.
LV USA Sept. 20
Leftwing activists have literally been arrested for starting some of these fires. There is video of arsonists being caught, yet the media ignores this, and actively denies it. Gee, why could that be?

Andy
MD Sept. 20
@LV Do you have any proof that these people were were left wing activist or just the kind of people who are always starting fires ad they have in the past ?

Cloudy
San Francisco Sept. 20
Oh, I guess all those videos of protesters in Portland burning down police stations were fake. Good to know.

me again
NYC- SF Sept. 20
The [neoliberal] left spends 24/7 preaching to their choir about Trump fascists dictatorship, an illegal government installed by a foreign power, destroying the constitution while preparing to seize power and ignore coming election results. There is a zero factual evidence for it, such as a refusal to follow judicial injunctions for example, but their well educated audiences are buying it whole day long. So what is so baffling that a rural audience after watching night after night Portland burning by arson and accompanied by "peaceful protest" graphics on TV would buy into arson speculations and rumors and ignore your disclaimers?

Socrates
Verona, N.J. Sept. 20
Facebook needs to be regulated since it has effectively organ-harvested the critical thinking skills of a significant portion of the population. It'd be better if thinking people simply deleted Facebook and let Facebook shrink and become the right-wing agit-prop tool that it truly is. Mark Zuckerberg is happy to to destabilize society with his little toy invention. You'd think with all that money, he could afford a conscience. What a wrecking ball Facebook is.

Reasonable
Orlando Sept. 20
"All this rumormongering leaves me feeling that the social fabric is unraveling, as if the shared understanding of reality that is the basis for any society is eroding." Ya think?

AU
San Diego, CA Sept. 20
@California Scientist Amen. We are more like an international terminal at this point. A bunch of people gathered by happenstance, heading in different directions, and often with very little in common.

Steve Bolger
New York City Sept. 20
@California Scientist: It is even worse than when Adlai Stevenson noted that there aren't enough educated people to elect a liberal government in the US.
MegWright Kansas City Sept. 20
@LV - The point is that "urbanites" aren't able to boss anyone around. It's the low population rural areas that have outsize political power thanks to the unfortunate design of our government. Every state gets two senators, regardless of population, and that also factors into the allocation of Electoral College votes, so that an EC vote from WY is worth 4 times as much as an EC vote from CA, for example. In 2016, Senate Democrats got 20 million more votes than Senate Republicans, yet Republicans kept control. In 2018, Senate Democrats got "only" 11.5 million more votes, and consequently lost seats. We're being governed by a minority in may areas of the country, and nationally, yet the "rural rubes" or whatever you want to call them, insist that they don't have nearly enough power.

M
CA Sept. 20
Six accused of starting Oregon blazes amid devastating wildfire season - NYPost
Robert Out west Sept. 20
Nice try at making it seem these loons started the big fires. https://www.oregonlive.com/wildfires/2020/09/rash-of-oregon-arson-cases-fuel-fear-conspiracy-theories-during-devastating-wildfires.html They're loons, okay? Just loons.

Rolfe
Shaker Heights Ohio Sept. 20
Strange that anyone living in or just knowing the west would NOT know that arsonists could not burn down huge chunks of forest if they where not so very dry.

Augury Unhappy
Bird Watcher, State of Grave Doubt Sept. 20
The ugly truth of Oregon's political past is asserting itself...we aren't in "Portlandia" anymore Nick.

Victor
Yokohama Sept. 20
The social fabric in the United States was never tightly knit and tolerance has always been in short supply...

Dang
Vermont Sept. 20
The adage "A sucker is born every day" has never rung truer. That people believe these rumors says a whole lot about how gullible many people are...

Schrodinger
Northern California Sept. 20
Ominous! There are two information ecosystems in this country and Americans increasingly live in different realities. Much of the media is in the business of massaging the egos of their readers by feeding them stories that confirm their biases and make them feel clever. There is less and less fact based news and more and more propaganda. A lot of people aren't really interested in facts. They just want to be told how right they are and how stupid and evil the people who disagree with them are. Media corporations are providing the market with what it desires, and what it desires is poisonous.
JRM Melbourne Sept. 20
The fires and storms, the pandemic, stupid conspiracy theories, Black Lives Matter, Trump and his sycophants...

Ilene Bilenky
Ridgway, CO Sept. 20
There is a reptilian brain need to believe this nonsense and to propagate it- because the believers are so terrified of the facts of the truth (and the lack of knowing what might be done to address those facts). The people who are true believers are pointless to discuss. They are too frightened. They need to believe this stuff. It is hopeless to address them. Dark times, indeed.

stormy
raleigh Sept. 20
With the natural buildup of combustible matter, combined with houses everywhere now and little land management, these fires will happen and will cause problems. Lots of things can start them and they will.
Len Arends California Sept. 20
You left out "a century of zero-tolerance policies toward wildland fires (creating precariously dense underbrush), and resistance to traditional controlled burning at the human/wilderness interface". It's not the whole story, but neither is climate change which, due to global technological leveling, is evermore the responsibility of China and India than Western civilization. Signed, a moderate progressive endlessly frustrated with breathless liberalism

Cenvalman
Fresno, CA Sept. 20
If only there were no arsonists. Here is a video of a woman who found a man on her property with matches in his hand (and no cigarettes, which was his excuse for having matches in his hand). She made a citizen's arrest. This happened in peaceful Oregon. Don't listen if you can't handle harsh language by a woman who is trying to save her property. Arson is real, and it is no joke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJW_M4pBCnY A man was arrested for arson in Southern Oregon. His fire damaged or destroyed numerous homes. https://abcnews.go.com/US/man-charged-arson-connection-almeda-fire-southern-oregon/story?id=72960208 Rumors of antifa notwithstanding, people in Oregon were looking for arsonists because there are arsonists.
Steve Fankuchen Oakland, CA Sept. 20
"Conspiracy theories" are, for the most part, not theories, merely assertions. A theory is subject to proof and disproof by evidence. In a world where truth has no inherent monetary value, don't expect it. To paraphrase President Clinton, "It's the internet, Stupid!" Follow the money: Agenda + Clickbaitability = Prominence That is the business model of the internet, a medium where "news" is whatever will produce the most clicks. As in profit. Unless and until the youngest generation developes a means of communication that does not depend on megacorporations, nothing will change. In the Sixties, a generation which disbelieved and had no honest access to the traditional media, created its own, the "alternative press." Hopefully, today's teenagers will develope their own way to communicate that is reliable. It is 100% guaranteed that if their "opposition" becomes an actual threat to the profits of Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, and the rest of their ilk, they will be cut off. As to why people attach themselves to "conspiracy theories", it's actually quite simple. Take QAnon for example: it is functionally just another religion competing for adherents. As with any religion, it offers its believers an explanation of what they deem is wrong while offering a path to right those wrongs. Certainty and simplicity: those are the essential elements of cults/religion/bumpersticker politics. And the internet guarantees that whatever you believe will be "validated."

Steve Fankuchen
Oakland, CA Sept. 20
"Conspiracy theories" are, for the most part, not theories, merely assertions. A theory is subject to proof and disproof by evidence. In a world where truth has no inherent monetary value, don't expect it. To paraphrase President Clinton, "It's the internet, Stupid!" Follow the money: Agenda + Clickbaitability = Prominence That is the business model of the internet, a medium where "news" is whatever will produce the most clicks. As in profit. Unless and until the youngest generation developes a means of communication that does not depend on megacorporations, nothing will change. In the Sixties, a generation which disbelieved and had no honest access to the traditional media, created its own, the "alternative press." Hopefully, today's teenagers will develope their own way to communicate that is reliable. It is 100% guaranteed that if their "opposition" becomes an actual threat to the profits of Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, and the rest of their ilk, they will be cut off. As to why people attach themselves to "conspiracy theories", it's actually quite simple. Take QAnon for example: it is functionally just another religion competing for adherents. As with any religion, it offers its believers an explanation of what they deem is wrong while offering a path to right those wrongs. Certainty and simplicity: those are the essential elements of cults/religion/bumpersticker politics. And the internet guarantees that whatever you believe will be "validated."
AU San Diego, CA Sept. 20
" All this rumormongering leaves me feeling that the social fabric is unraveling, as if the shared understanding of reality that is the basis for any society is eroding." You betcha. (Palin doesn't look half bad compared to the current batch.) It's a simple formula: social media driven disinformation + extreme capitalism which leaves us with no real will to address it + legitimate grievances like racism and financial insecurity = craziness on all sides, fanned by a president whose personal agenda takes precedence over absolutely everything. All societies are constantly dealing with potentially destabilizing threats. Their institutions, media, leadership, and understanding of a common good are their immune system. Ours is compromised, we are destabilized.
Ludmilla Wightman Princeton NJ Sept. 20
How about a judicious Forrest management? We live in a period of global warming because of our planet axis precision, aggravated by the presence of an unprecedented population explosion needing more water, more food, the production of which needs more arable land, cutting trees, displacing wild animals, exhausting the aquifer. Cutting trees increases the CO2 in the atmosphere. More people in India, more cattle emitting methane, more old fashioned way of cooking food and producing more CO2 ... Permanent frost melting also sends more methane in the atmosphere ... The climate is extremely complex to permit exact modeling, but it is clear that if we want to stay healthy, it is vital to regularly clear our western forests of dead wood in order to prevent today's disaster of millions of people, particularly children with asthma and old people breathing the heavily polluted air. It is time to move to solar, wind power, electric trucks, cars etc. The technology is here. Let's hope that Biden will support clean air as means to better health. If all these years instead of using abstract terms like global warming or climate change, we have been appealing to people to keep the air clean in order to have better health, perhaps they would have stopped buying the behemoths cars, producing so much pollution?

Peter
Texas Sept. 20
As Nicholas and many readers on this page already know, this commentary is more evidence of how needlessly and recklessly polarized our country has become. When tribal instincts push people to look for anything - fact, fiction or fantasy - on social media or "rage commentary" that supports and validates their identities they will glom onto it faster than maggots on dead flesh. It is a sad state of affairs when so many people of all political persuasions will not take the time - even a few minutes - to question and investigate the latest "truth" being promoted. The new culture of low information consumers seems to be spreading as fast as a pandemic despite the heroic efforts of honest journalism. I wonder if low information consumption was so endemic to the citizens of Ancient Rome and Greece - long before Twitter, Facebook and Rage TV? People, please take a moment to "click" one step further to see if the latest conspiracy story is true. Why help propagate lies? It will only come back to haunt you, or your children.
ST New York, NY Sept. 20
Antifa or not, at least some of the big fires have been started by arsonists. Of this fact we have video proof. By downplaying or even denying it, the media are just as bad as the conspiracy theorists in promoting disinformation.

Bob Koelle
Livermore, CA Sept. 20
This reminds me of a time when people saw "Reds" behind anything that was going wrong in the country. Nothing new, but just as pathetically paranoid. I wonder how many people, or their parents, fit into both groups?

AT
Idaho Sept. 20
Here's another urban myth. Ok, more a lefty myth. That we can just keep adding people to this country (urban, suburban, rural, big city, anywhere and everywhere) and it won't have any effect. With the corollary that it's just a matter of "green new deal" or everybody getting a Prius or the dummies in the sticks realizing climate change is real and then we can just go on like this forever. We can't. Not only is our much hated lifestyle, which from what I can see, nobody really wants to give up, killing us, but believing 330 million Americans that add 2-3 million more a year is not a problem at all. Our entire way of life: endless population and economic growth is unsustainable. We don't need to wait until 2050 to see it. Just step outside.
Robert Out west Sept. 20
It is very difficult to teach people that "research," doesn't mean you go to some TV show or website you like and root around for stuff that tells you what you want to hear. One prob seems to be really simple: it takes actual work to do it right. Another is that research, done well, has an ugly habit of forcing you to think at least a little about whether your own ideas make any sense. And a third is that people really, really don't like it when their political views start getting contradicted by reality. It seems to be easier to change reality than to change views, even a little. Oh, and another prob? Too few Americans really read anything worth reading. I'm all for funsies (and I've probably read more crummy science fiction than all y'all put together) but one of the joys of walking around in Paris is seeing that the kiosks and bookstores still sell a ton of stuff on philosophy, lit, economics, and that everywhere, people actually read them. Books teach thought. Newsmax don't.
Steve Bolger New York City Sept. 20
@Beer Can Boyd: As a native-born American, I think the US fell down when the Congress put "under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1953, ostensibly to preclude anyone thinking about Godless communism, and gave itself a stroke.

J. Park
Seattle Sept. 20
We, all of us, need to stop accepting assertions without a source of any sort identified.

Donald
Florida Sept. 20
... So much for our useless 750 Billion dollar military budget.

Joe Smith
Chicago Sept. 20
Societies are supposed to evolve. Instead, we are descending backwards into the age of witch hunts.

Pop
PA Sept. 20
Amazing how ,close minded people become when, for them, everything is political.

Toto
Looking for Dorothy Sept. 20
The melting pot burned over. It is now a word salad. But appears there is a method to the madness. It is hard for the world to tell the madness from the method
ARL Texas Sept. 20
@Carolyn then there are the lies and the demonization of China and Russia by both parties to top it off. How can voters believe anything and decide before they vote?

Harcourt
Florida Sept. 20 Times Pick
Supporting this atmosphere of potential violence are some of my republican friends. They are mostly educated and not stupid. Yet they continue to support a man whom I think holds the responsibility for most of the violence if it comes. Now I want to get down to my point about these supporters. I believe they have succumbed to a cult-like dynamic. I say this because no rational person could possibly support Trump. Religious cults create this same addiction and irrationality. When my friends disagree with me, they try to put our friendship hostage to no further discussion of politics. They are unwilling to even be confronted with objections to their support of Trump. I have decided that I can always make new friends. What I do not want to do is take on the task of building a new country because I stayed silent.
Robbie J. Miami Florida Sept. 20
@Harcourt "They are mostly educated and not stupid." In my opinion, educated persons who behave as you describe never benefited from their education. Even worse, to me it seems like persons who behave like that are of the opinion that what they learnt in school is only for the purpose of writing the exams they needed to pass to get out of school. It was all just noise to them.

CA
Vermont Sept. 20 Times Pick
You nailed it. There is no longer "a shared reality" in America. So we have wildly different views of who Joe Biden and Donald Trump are. And how serious climate change is. And whether it's important to wear a mask. And if left-wing anarchists set forest fires. Thank you, Internet. Thank you, social media barons who refuse to ban Russian propaganda and manipulated videos. Thank you FCC that does not rein in Fox News and their promotion of lies. Who will step in and stop this madness?
AU San Diego, CA Sept. 20
@CA I agree with you completely except for the refusal to stop Russian interference. We can't. We can't unless we stop US interference in the process. The problem is that US interference, and rumor mongering, are the business model of these platforms which happen to be some of our largest companies. Extreme capitalism is preventing us from addressing any and all issues propagated by these companies. Russia is just a speck.

Objectivist
Mass. Sept. 20
Antifa adherents and wildfires ? Seems pretty far-fetched. Even ridiculous. But setting fire to occupied apartment buildings in Portland ? Oh yes, definitely. It happened, and more is on the menu, as well as municipal and federal buildings. Don't believe it ? Read the news releases for yourself, on the Portland Police Bureau's website.

James Thurber
Mountain View, CA Sept. 20
An excellent discussion of the perils of social media. Although newspapers, TV, radio, magazines have a historical principal of "generally" telling the truth, social media has opened up the world to every single Tom, Dick and Harry who with to spread their message. I believe that how we, as a nation, as a species, handle social media will define what happens over the next decade.
vw pgh Sept. 20
The state of this country is absolutely terrifying. While the shift to ever more conservative, insular, xenophobic, coroporate-controlled government has been going on for years, with the faux election of trump democracy is what has become fake, while common sense, empathy, and both fiscal and environmental responsibility have virtually disappeared. The US has gone off the deep end...

Mike S.
Eugene, OR Sept. 20 Times Pick
One of my neighbors has a bumper sticker that Covid is a Scamdemic and Plandemic...

Andy Makar
Mason County WA Sept. 20
Years ago I read a science fiction short story that is unsettling in its analogy to this situation. I starts with aliens visiting the Earth and accidently leaving behind a device that can allow metal to be manipulated by softening it, then hardening it. The device gets copied and mass produced. When they returned a year later, they come back and cannot fathom how their device could have resulted in anarchy. THAT is the internet. 5 Recommend Share
GP Oakland Sept. 20
@Andy Makar One supposes that is a reference to the origins of metalworking? And the societal changes it produced? Not bad.

GP
Oakland Sept. 20
Let me ask you all a question. If your neighbor told you the fire in a nearby Oregon town was started by antifa, how would you disprove it? Since you cannot provide evidence for a negative statement, it's difficult. There is actually some evidence that antifa did start the fire: a voice said it on the radio, and tv showed them lighting fireworks in Portland. This isn't very good evidence, but it is evidence, and you can't produce any evidence that antifa did not do it (because there can't be any.) So you are in the position of asking your neighbor to look at the quality of the evidence. This is something very few outside the legal and scientific world are capable of. But that is all you have. Ultimately, it really does go back to belief. How many of us could independently prove that the earth turns around the sun? Those of us who aren't astronomers choose to accept this belief based on what we've been told, and that's how it is with antifa starting the fires.

Blaise Descartes
Seattle Sept. 20
Kristof is afraid that fires in the West represent the new normal. The evidence suggests that this fear is well-founded. He is concerned about the government's paralysis. That is partly due to Trump, who stands a good chance of being reelected on November 3. He is worried about ordinary citizens seeking oversimplified answers and finding them in the conspiracy theories presenting the fire as the work of antifa. I am more worried about the breakdown in credibility of news sources like the NY Times, which finds itself in competition with Fox News and a host of online sources. Indeed, you-tube and facebook will select news stories for you, confirming whatever bias you bring to your reading of the news. There is no guarantee that democracy will survive. One of the things that keeps me up at night is the realization that not only the right, but the left, is subject to oversimplified presentations of global warming. Global warming is a consequence of too much population growth. But as we argue over freedoms for LGBTQ minorities liberals have neglected the importance of freedom of speech. And voices which have warned about population growth have been simply ignored by the left. It isn't enough to shift from Fords using gasoline to Teslas running on electricity. We also need to control population growth. The population of earth will double again by 2072 if current rates continue. Population growth threatens to overwhelm the attempts to move to clean energy. 2 Recommend

secular socialist dem
Bettendorf, IA Sept. 20
The scientific consensus will also conclude that not allowing wildfires to burn compounds the problem. While what I am about to type is not science, continued development in fire prone areas amplifies and compounds every aspect of the problem. From my perspective the system has evolved to socializing cost and privatizing cost in every way. I don't see it getting better, until such time as individuals are held accountable this should be considered normal.
deb inWA Sept. 20
@secular socialist dem PG&E just paid billions in fines and PLEADED GUILTY in starting last year's Paradise fire. They also have already admitted fault in several fires started by their faulty, untended grid. "Individuals" don't need to be held accountable unless there are rules in place for them to follow regarding wildfire. There already are. Most already do. Why do folks act so proud about their 'anti-science' opinion? It's not like this conversation isn't ongoing; nobody argues that development in fire prone areas' carries risks. So does rebuilding in Oklahoma, Florida and Louisiana..... You're right (although confused) about socializing RISK and privatizing PROFIT. See PG&E above.
S Day Texas Sept. 20
Unsure how people lighting fires directly indicates climate change is corroborated. The fellow who was arrested in Tacoma, WA: https://thepostmillennial.com/antifa-activist-charged-for-fire-set-in-washington Looking to past wildfires, like the one's in Montana & Idaho in 2008, 5.5 million acres were burned and certain interest groups advocated for them to burn out because it's apart of the natural cycle. Federal government shouldn't send assistance unless it's possibly to communities in threat of burning, who are humans to say we ought to stop mother nature? It's natural to let these fires burn, if you try to hinder it's course you are stopping the cycle.
Doug Terry Maryland, Washington DC metro Sept. 20 Times Pick
Why do people believe wild stupid things more than actual facts? Partly it is because they like the wild stupid thing more, it gives them some weird comfort. It is also because people are busying with their lives and don't have time to gather enough information to counter the wild rumor that flies around faster than the speed of sound. The most important aspect of successful conspiracy theories is they impart to the person holding them the idea that they are smarter than other people and have "cracked the code" that explains everything or a lot of big things that people don't understand. Reading, thinking, considering and re-considering can seem like hard work, particularly if it is foreign to one's experience and life training. Why not just lock on to a cool idea that comes around, even if it is weird? .

.. ... ...

Murphy San Francisco Sept. 20 Times Pick
This story highlights for me an equally growing problem, the "selective framing" by media outlets on the left and right (NYT and Fox as just two examples). To read Mr Kristof's version, you may believe that arsonists are wild figments of the unhinged radical right imagination. To read the same story on Fox, Antifa arsonists are working their way up your street.

Kristin
Portland, OR Sept. 20 Times Pick
"...the shared understanding of reality that is the basis for any society is eroding." And yet reality still exist. Normally, if someone starts to exhibit the kind of behavior that these "vigilantes" are - screaming about boogeymen, thinking people are out to get them, engaging in aggressive behavior based on paranoid fantasies, creating self-reinforcing delusions, becoming obsessed with baseless conspiracy theories - we would rightly diagnose them as being mentally ill, and to the extent that they represent a danger to others, confine them. I don't think we can afford to see this as just a time of extreme differences of opinion. Facts, truth and reality are still actual, tangible things. And those who have become so disassociated from them that they are stopping vehicles and hunting down their fellow citizen need to be dealt with appropriately.

phornbein
Colorado Sept. 20
We have been witnessing the start of the Second Civil War in America. If we accept the definition of a civil war as a conflict between factions of citizens for either secession or control of the government--including organizations within the existing government--then we are in the beginning stages of a Second Civil War. The question is what the level of violence will be (not will there be violence, but how much violence). We are beginning to see indications of that level. When naturally or accidentally caused wildfires are attributed to one faction as a way to stoke the fires of civil violence, then physical violence between factions is a heartbeat away simply because of the falsity and extremity of the accusations. The era of peaceful protest has passed because of the intensity of feelings on both sides; the anger produced when a government begins denying civil rights, e.g., Freedom of Speech and the Right to Assemble, through legal actions where protest organizers could be charged with sedition (see Barr's comments, 9/16/2020, NYT), which then suggests that all protests become illegal, the fires of violence are stoked. With a heavily-armed populace on both sides, gunfire is a hair-trigger pull away. If Trump and the Republican's intention was to remake America in their image (I leave it to you to supply that image), they are succeeding. If Putin's intention was to bring down America, he is succeeding. If Xi's intention was to dominate the world, he is on that path. Vote 33 Recommend Share
Jumblegym Longmont CO Sept. 20
@phornbein They may have already done it. Keep your powder dry.

Mac
New York Sept. 20
The social fabric has unraveled. Aided and abetted by the world of the social networks....
Brooklyncowgirl USA. Sept. 20
... There's an old saying "Those who the gods would destroy they first make mad." I have come to the conclusion that America has gone qute a long way down that road.
Jontavious Atlanta Sept. 20
And yet, Mr. Kristoff, you never make mention of the real threat that groups like Antifa and other radical left rioters pose to this country (forgetting about attacks on federal buildings in Portland? Attempts to firebomb courthouses? Violence against law enforcement officers?). No, instead it's always Trump, or Trump supporters who are your focus. I do not know whether Antifa has been involved in any of these recent fires, but I do know that these violent elements on the left pose a massive danger to our democracy. You are correct about one thing, though: We should brace ourselves. It's just "what" we need to brace for that is off mark in your article...
Jean CA Sept. 19
It's heartbreaking to watch these three West Coast states burned. For days, the sky was red and the air was unbreathable. But the saddest part was the feeling of helplessness.

Aram Hollman
Arlington, MA Sept. 19
40 years ago, I hitchhiked around the Pacific Northwest during the summer after Mt. St. Helens blew up. Mt. Rainier was ash-coated, as were the wild blueberries I often ate. Epic and Biblical are words inadequate to describe that destruction near Mt. St. Helens, with millions of huge, old trees blown down, piles of mud, and rivers diverted. Yet I and others knew that eventually, that land would regrow, and it did.
Stephanie Wood Montclair NJ Sept. 20
I see a lot of egotism and self-love on both sides. The so-called progressives in our community are breeding at baby boom levels, driving SUVs, and, before the pandemic, you'd see a dozen school buses idling outside every school. Development is out of control as people flee from the city, and people flee from here, or downsize, and breed and breed and breed. Two years ago, we had a flash flood and our street was under water, and there was a lot of damage all over town. Hurricane Irene in 2011 left many with over a foot of water in their basements. And let's not even start on Sandy. My friend lives in Pensacola; their downtown area is under three or four feet of water from Hurricane Sally. It's not just fire, it's floods, and it's not just the GOP which is the problem...
Ted Magnuson Portland OR Sept. 19
That the fires have become a political football is well covered in this piece. As was the climate change crisis...

John Brown
Idaho Sept. 19
I don't blame anyone for guarding their roads if they think arsonists are about. The Tillamook Burn was larger and more devastating than these fires but are we to blame climate change ? Environmentalists and Liberals who do not even live out West, who did not rely upon Logging, placed their concerns about the Spotted Owl and Virgin Forests about the danger of Forest Fires and the livelihood of Loggers and the Towns and Peoples who depended upon Logging. Managed Logging of Forests is not an inherently evil act. Clearing the bush and dead trees is not bad in and of itself. Let Logging companies responsibly manage sections of the Forrests, let Towns clear fire breaks around their perimeters. Place large Water towers in strategic points throughout the Forests, huge mounds of dirt/sand/gravel next to them so that the Firefighters have what they need to fight the fires. Force developers to build houses 50 feet apart. Require fireproof roofs, require thinning of trees in housing developments. Require volunteer Fire Departments in every neighborhood so that if they do nothing else, they can cut a fire break, water down the grasses around their neighborhoods, chase and extinguish embers, something/anything versus fleeing their homes without putting up a fight.

Robert
Seattle Sept. 19
"... dry conditions exacerbated by climate change coupled with an unusual windstorm ..." May I add that a couple of other things have also contributed to making the fires worse or making them harder to manage? For a century or so, in California, Oregon and Washington we have not been letting the normal, periodic fires burn. Consequently, a great deal of fuel has built up on the forest floor. Second, folks have increasingly been building homes or even neighborhoods in places which have historically seen such normal, periodic fires.

Elizabeth
CA Sept. 20
@Robert Yes. But now controlled burns are a bit problematic, given the droughts, the heat, the massive fuel loads from all the dead trees. It's just so easy for the controlled burns to get out of control.

Carver
Oregon Sept. 19
Hi, I am from Clackamas County metro. Every time a FaceBook "Friend" (and I personally know all of mine) posted a rumor, I tried to find the footage from any of our 4 local news stations to depute their post but they just shared another one. One said she didn't trust KGW 8 the local NBC station and when I told her the same story was on KPTV 12, the local Fox station. She said, "I'm just stressed"
M.i. Estner Wayland, MA Sept. 19
@David Biesecker Remember that half the people are of below average intelligence. That may answer the existence of the small percentage of conspiracy theorists. One problem is social media provides free and outsized loudspeaker systems that enables them to find each other.

GreenSpirit
Pacific Northwest Sept. 19
@M.i. Estner First, let me identify myself as a liberal Democrat who has a masters degree. I find it more than disheartening when half of the country, or half of rural or not formally educated folks are said to have low intelligent quotas, critical thinking skills or analytical abilities. You better believe that when a highly trained Eastern Oregon firefighter is assessing how to save peoples lives, homes and land, has to quickly act with their many faceted skill set and are calling on abilities you or I would not be able to fathom. Same with farmers of large pieces of complicated crops and land. Same with city managers, librarians, and social workers for the elderly--all having low city budgets. What about the veterinarians, doctors and nurses in rural areas? This is exactly the same as calling Black or Hispanics people of lower intelligence. And, there are different types of intelligence. I know a literary critic, a liberal Democrat, who doesn't have the critical thinking skills to run her own home or raise her children. If you look, you can see these same differences in any group. It has to do with the way people are raised, what they are using their skill sets for, what information they are used to consuming, money, ideology, etc...And it has to do with being devalued for growing your food, producing your meat, chicken and eggs. I'm not excusing the violence, guns, racism and hatred. These divides have been with us for ages. Please don't stoke the fires.

Usok
Houston Sept. 19
If we have a selfish federal government, then we will have selfish states and people. Everyone is for himself or herself. No one will think about other people or public good. It all started from the top
Kathy Lollock Santa Rosa, CA Sept. 19
In 2017, 2018, and 2019 northern California's new phenomenon of forceful 40 to 60 miles per hour winds - in Fall, no less - caused old and aging electrical equipment to malfunction. As a consequence, too much of Santa Rosa burnt to the ground, and the entire town of Paradise ceased to exist. This year during the heat of a hotter than usual summer following yet another dry winter, we had dry lightning strikes from Sonoma County to Santa Clara County and beyond.

Stuck on a mountain
New England Sept. 19
Yes, the science is clear and you fail to mention it. The forest fires reach critical mass and spread because of the surplus of dead or dying trees. They are there because the federal government essentially no longer allows logging on its vast landholdings and also fails to allow controlled burns to clean out the tinderbox. I won't bother attaching a link because any Google search proves the point. Why focus on hysteria and rumermongering among the Deplorables? Come on, Mr. Kristof, you were a Deplorable once (when you were a kid growing up in the countryside) as was I. Please defend them sometimes, particularly when the actual causes are so well documented.

Jorn
Sagebrush Country Sept. 19
@Stuck on a mountain Western States are working to clear the brush from forests where, due to our previous incomplete understanding of forest ecology, fires were suppressed for a century. However, the cost is astronomical and there are millions of acres left to clear. Spending their entire forest management budgets fighting current wildfires doesn't help. We've been doing controlled burns for decades but in many areas, they're now too dangerous. Dry forests and a dense understory can quickly turn a "controlled burn" into a conflagration. Many ranchers and timber companies who profit from our state and national forests seem unwilling to pay to keep those forests healthy. People who live in or near forests mostly have incomes too low to pay for forest management. The National Forest Service, Department of the Interior and USDA have made some progress, but the problem is huge. Saying we can prevent forest fires by allowing larger timber harvests is an oversimplification. No solution to this complex issue will be simple, perfect or cheap.

Glenn Ribotsky
Queens Sept. 19
Wacky conspiracy theories to explain seemingly bizarre and unusual occurrences have been around since the dawn of human cognition. But in an electronic/social media age, these get spread even faster than a wind-blown fire climbs a canyon hillside. Previously, they were spread one set of ears at a time; now millions of eyes can read them every second. And that is a major part of the problem.

DeHypnotist
West Linn, Oregon Sept. 19
As a grad student in sociology, having lived through the 60s and participated in the counterculture, I was deeply intrigued by the social construction of reality - how we come to share a taken-for-granted world. This is a long-standing concern within sociological social psychology. We examined how language, interpersonal communications, media and social structure shaped ones perception of one's self, what is real, what's important. At the time, however, this was considered theoretical and academic. 40 years later, understanding how Americans' realities have come to diverge is no longer armchair social science. It's urgent and in our faces, as is the question of how can we heal this terrible fracturing of our world?

Alex B
Newton, MA Sept. 19
@DeHypnotist Yes. When studying for the degree in and then teaching sociology in my early years, I learned that, too. But, I have to admit, it's actually taken all the decades of life since then, and now the obvious confirmation of it by this current 'reality' to actually realize, deep down in my guts, that we 'make up' our so-called 'social reality' simply to serve the most basic of biological requirements: the need to dominate in the deadly completion with the other 'tribes' of our species just to survive. We are, after all, animals like all the others, no matter how much we blab about how much 'smarter' we are.

Metaecongary
Show Low, AZ Sept. 20
@Alex B The primal driver, deep in the core of our brain, is usefully thought of as "reptilian." Cold-blooded. Egoistic. Hedonistic. And, in extreme cases, narcissistic, and, heaven forbid when all three are present...

Linda
Anchorage Sept. 19
I lived for a few years in Brazil when it was a dictatorship. The similarities between Brazil and what is happening in the US is startling. The police were being used to quell peaceful protesters and the justice system co-opted by authorities, fear mongering were present, just as now in the US....

Lois Ruble
San Diego Sept. 19
I didn't live in the US from 1977-1999, only visiting on short trips. That enabled me to see changes in society that were slow and not seen by those residing here. And when I came back permanently I could feel immediately a deep change....

JD Athey
Oregon Sept. 20
@Thomas Murphy 'Pandering to the lowest common denominator is how they play their game, and always have:'
Agoldstein Pdx Sept. 19
Perhaps an apt metaphor for the "danger sign ahead" is the approach of a Category three hurricane and it's increasing in intensity. One of the stark disconnects is between the message in an article like this and the politicians and citizens who are little concerned about tempering rhetoric and elevating the importance of eschewing misinformation. We are in the Misinformation Age and the victims of a cyber war, evolving into a civil war.
Giogio Houston Sept. 20
@ML What is happening here? These are the beginnings of what happened in Germany in the 30s. Over there the reason was the loss of WWI. Here, is the obvious decline of the American lifestyle and we have not seen anything yet. The range of the economic decline is covered by 7 trillion dollars in phony money. I fervently hope and pray that is not too late to stop the process. All men and women of goodwill have to rally to restore a sane, and one, country . Stay safe! It is going to get worse before it gets better.

grennan
green bay Sept. 19
@FunkyIrishman Right on. Water is an enormous issue waiting to happen here -- and Wisconsin is estimated to have between 10 and 20 percent of the world's fresh water (depending on how it's calculated and whether that includes some of Lakes Michigan and Superior. A Dept. of Climate, Weather and Water would be a logical cabinet department.

poslug
Cambridge Sept. 20
@FunkyIrishman And polluting the potable water continues sometimes by the most resolvable modern approaches: sewers and water treatment plants. Reagan ended federal funding for sewers leaving septic systems (and now ancient sewers) where sewers would lead to protected fresh water. All the medicines, chemicals, and toxins seep unseen but very real into fresh and also salt water. We are not a modern nation any more.

[Sep 23, 2020] Never Forget- Smoking Gun Intel Memo From 1990s Warned Of Frankenstein The CIA Created

Notable quotes:
"... knew and bluntly acknowledged ..."
"... War on The Rocks ..."
"... The U.S. State Dept.'s own numbers at the height of the war in Syria: access the full report at STATE.GOV ..."
Sep 23, 2020 | www.blacklistednews.com
SOURCE: ZEROHEDGE

As Americans pause to remember the tragic events of September 11, 2001 which saw almost 3,000 innocents killed in the worst terror attack in United States history, it might also be worth contemplating the horrific wars and foreign quagmires unleashed during the subsequent 'war on terror'.

Bush's so-called Global War on Terror targeted 'rogue states' like Saddam's Iraq, but also consistently had a focus on uprooting and destroying al-Qaeda and other armed Islamist terror organizations (this led to the falsehood that Baathist Saddam and AQ were in cahoots). But the idea that Washington from the start saw al-Qaeda and its affiliates as some kind of eternal enemy is largely a myth.

Recall that the US covertly supported the Afghan mujahideen and other international jihadists throughout the 1980's Afghan-Soviet War, the very campaign in which hardened al-Qaeda terrorists got their start. In 1999 The Guardian in a rare moment of honest mainstream journalism warned of the Frankenstein the CIA created -- among their ranks a terror mastermind named Osama bin Laden .

But it was all the way back in 1993 that a then classified intelligence memo warned that the very fighters the CIA previously trained would soon turn their weapons on the US and its allies. The 'secret' document was declassified in 2009, but has remained largely obscure in mainstream media reporting, despite being the first to contain a bombshell admission.

A terrorism analyst at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research named Gina Bennett wrote in the 1993 memo "The Wandering Mujahidin: Armed and Dangerous," that --

"support network that funneled money, supplies, and manpower to supplement the Afghan mujahidin" in the war against the Soviets, "is now contributing experienced fighters to militant Islamic groups worldwide."

The concluding section contains the most revelatory statements, again remembering these words were written nearly a decade before the 9/11 attacks :

US support of the mujahidin during the Afghan war will not necessarily protect US interests from attack.

...Americans will become the targets of radical Muslims' wrath. Afghan war veterans, scattered throughout the world, could surprise the US with violence in unexpected locales.

There it is in black and white print: the United States government knew and bluntly acknowledged that the very militants it armed and trained to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars would eventually turn that very training and those very weapons back on the American people .

And this was not at all a "small" or insignificant group, instead as The Guardian wrote a mere two years before 9/11 :

American officials estimate that, from 1985 to 1992, 12,500 foreigners were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and urban guerrilla warfare in Afghan camps the CIA helped to set up .

But don't think for a moment that there was ever a "lesson learned" by Washington.

Instead the CIA and other US agencies repeated the 1980s policy of arming jihadists to overthrow US enemy regimes in places like Libya and Syria even long after the "lesson" of 9/11. As War on The Rocks recounted :

Despite the passage of time, the issues Ms. Bennett raised in her 1993 work continue to be relevant today. This fact is a sign of the persistence of the problem of Sunni jihadism and the "wandering mujahidin." Today, of course, the problem isn't Afghanistan but Syria. While the war there is far from over, there is already widespread nervousness, particularly in Europe, about what will happen when the foreign fighters return from that conflict.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1304385396692914177&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.blacklistednews.com%2Farticle%2F77999%2Fnever-forget-smoking-gun-intel-memo-from-1990s-warned-of-frankenstein-the-cia.html&theme=light&widgetsVersion=219d021%3A1598982042171&width=550px

On 9/11 we should never forget the innocent lives lost, but we should also never forget the Frankenstein of jihad the CIA created .

* * *

The U.S. State Dept.'s own numbers at the height of the war in Syria: access the full report at STATE.GOV

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[Sep 23, 2020] And why GLM protests are concentared on Oregon?

Sep 23, 2020 | www.nytimes.com


Augury Unhappy Bird Watcher, State of Grave Doubt Sept. 20

Oregon's racial demographics White alone, percent 86.7% Black or African American alone, percent 2.2% Alabama's racial demographics White alone, percent 69.1% Black or African American alone, percent26.8%

[Sep 21, 2020] Fascism like neoliberalism is always adamantly, fiercely anti-socialist

Notable quotes:
"... Yes, if was designed and supported as a tool of suppression of socialist movement. As an instrument of suppression of socialist ideas. Still it borrowed, at least on the program level, some elements of the programs of socialist parties. ..."
Sep 21, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

Likbez , September 21, 2020 1:59 pm

THX. Perhaps Nationalist Socialist was taken too literally there. In practice, Fascism was actually devoutly anti-socialist.

Yes, if was designed and supported as a tool of suppression of socialist movement. As an instrument of suppression of socialist ideas. Still it borrowed, at least on the program level, some elements of the programs of socialist parties.

Hitler and Mussolini were important leaders, but their movements succeeded through gaining the favor of the middle class masses and the ruling elites. They won that favor by their basic program. Of course neither had a formal written platform (Nazism's "unalterable" 25 Points became a joke, while Mussolini boasted about the untheoretical nature of his movement in its early years), but their basic intentions emerged clearly from their speeches and even more so from the style and slogans of their movements.

They proposed to exalt national power by building a dictatorially integrated national community on the model of methods and moods familiar from World War 1. They also benefited from being in the right countries at the right time to advance a plausible alternative political approach

But simultaneously it tried to attract some socialists into his ranks. BTW Mussolini was the editor-in-chief of Avante, so he was the leading figure in Italian socialist movement before his metamorphose into a fascist. From Wikipedia:

He had become one of Italy's most prominent socialists. In September 1911, Mussolini participated in a riot, led by socialists, against the Italian war in Libya. He bitterly denounced Italy's "imperialist war", an action that earned him a five-month jail term.[38] After his release, he helped expel Ivanoe Bonomi and Leonida Bissolati from the Socialist Party, as they were two "revisionists" who had supported the war.

He was rewarded the editorship of the Socialist Party newspaper Avanti! Under his leadership, its circulation soon rose from 20,000 to 100,000.[39] John Gunther in 1940 called him "one of the best journalists alive"; Mussolini was a working reporter while preparing for the March on Rome, and wrote for the Hearst News Service until 1935.[26]

Mussolini was so familiar with Marxist literature that in his own writings he would not only quote from well-known Marxist works but also from the relatively obscure works.[40] During this period Mussolini considered himself a Marxist and he described Marx as "the greatest of all theorists of socialism."[41]

[Sep 21, 2020] Hyperinflation, Fascism and War: How the New World Order May Be Defeated Once More by Matthew Ehret

Sep 19, 2020 | thesaker.is

49 Comments

By Matthew Ehret for the Saker Blog

While the world's attention is absorbed by tectonic shifts unfolding across America as "a perfect storm of civil war, and military coup threatens to undo both the elections and the very foundations of the republic itself , something very ominous has appeared "off of the radar" of most onlookers. This something is a financial collapse of the trans-Atlantic banks that threatens to unleash chaos upon the world. It is this collapse that underlies the desperate efforts being made by the neo-con drive for total war with Russia, China and other members of the growing Mutlipolar Alliance today.

In recent articles, I have mentioned that the Bank of England-led "solution" to this oncoming financial blowout of the $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble is being pushed under the cover of a "Great Global Reset" which is an ugly and desperate effort to use COVID-19 as a cover for the imposition of a new post-covid world order operating system. Since the new "rules" of this new system are very similar to the 1923 Bank of England "solution" to Germany's economic chaos which eventually required a fascist governance mechanism to impose it onto the masses, I wish to take a deeper look at the causes and effects of Weimar Germany's completely un-necessary collapse into hyperinflation and chaos during the period of 1919-1923.

In this essay, I will go further to examine how those same architects of hyperfinflation came close to establishing a global bankers' dictatorship in 1933 and how that early attempt at a New World Order was fortunately derailed through a bold fight which has been written out of popular history books.

We will investigate in depth how a major war broke out within America led by anti-imperial patriots in opposition to the forces of Wall Street and London's Deep State and we will examine how this clash of paradigms came to a head in 1943-1945.

This historical study is not being conducted for entertainment, nor should this be seen as a purely academic exercise, but is being created for the simple fact that the world is coming to a total systemic meltdown and unless certain suppressed facts of 20 th century history are brought to light, then those forces who have destroyed our collective memory of what we once were will remain in the drivers seat as society is carried into a new age of fascism and world war.

Versailles and the Destruction of Germany

Britain had been the leading hand behind the orchestration of WWI and the destruction of the potential German-Russian-American-Ottoman alliance that had begun to take form by the late 19 th century as foolish Kaiser Wilhelm discovered (though sadly too late) when he said: "the world will be engulfed in the most terrible of wars, the ultimate aim of which is the ruin of Germany. England, France and Russia have conspired for our annihilation that is the naked truth of the situation which was slowly but surely created by Edward VII".

Just as the British oligarchy managed the war, so too did they organize the reparations conference in France which, among other things, imposed impossible debt repayments upon a defeated Germany and created the League of Nations which was meant to become the instrument for a "post-nation state world order". Lloyd George led the British delegation alongside his assistant Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian), Leo Amery, Lord Robert Cecil and Lord John Maynard Keynes who have a long term agenda to bring about a global dictatorship. All of these figures were members of the newly emerging Round Table Movement, that had taken full control of Britain by ousting Asquith in 1916 , and which is at the heart of today's "deep state".

After the 1918 Armistice dismantled Germany's army and navy, the once powerful nation was now forced to pay the impossible sum of 132 billion gold marks to the victors and had to give up territories representing 10% of its population (Alsace-Loraine, Ruhr, and North Silesia) which made up 15% of its arable land, 12% of its livestock, 74% of its iron ore, 63% of its zinc production, and 26% of its coal. Germany also had to give up 8000 locomotives, 225 000 railcars and all of its colonies. It was a field day of modern pillage.

Germany was left with very few options. Taxes were increased and imports were cut entirely while exports were increased. This policy (reminiscent of the IMF austerity techniques in use today) failed entirely as both fell 60%. Germany gave up half of its gold supply and still barely a dent was made in the debt payments. By June 1920 the decision was made to begin a new strategy: increase the printing press . Rather than the "miracle cure" which desperate monetarists foolishly believed it would be, this solution resulted in an asymptotic devaluation of the currency into hyperinflation. From June 1920 to October 1923 the money supply in circulation skyrocketed from 68.1 gold marks to 496.6 quintillion gold marks. In June 1922, 300 marks exchanged $1 US and in November 1923, it took 42 trillion marks to get $1 US! Images are still available of Germans pushing wheelbarrows of cash down the street, just to buy a stick of butter and bread (1Kg of Bread sold for $428 billion marks in 1923).

With the currency's loss of value, industrial output fell by 50%, unemployment rose to over 30% and food intake collapsed by over half of pre-war levels. German director Fritz Lang's 1922 film Dr. Mabuse (The Gambler) exposed the insanity of German population's collapse into speculative insanity as those who had the means began betting against the German mark in order to protect themselves thus only helping to collapse the mark from within. This is very reminiscent of those Americans today short selling the US dollar rather than fighting for a systemic solution.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/zME775cE_gI?feature=oembed

There was resistance.

The dark effects of Versailles were not unknown and Germany's Nazi-stained destiny was anything but pre-determined. It is a provable fact often left out of history books that patriotic forces from Russia, America and Germany attempted courageously to change the tragic trajectory of hyperinflation and fascism which WOULD HAVE prevented the rise of Hitler and WWII had their efforts not been sabotaged.

From America itself, a new Presidential team under the leadership of William Harding quickly reversed the pro-League of Nations agenda of the rabidly anglophile President Woodrow Wilson. A leading US industrialist named Washington Baker Vanderclip who had led in the world's largest trade agreement in history with Russia to the tune of $3 billion in 1920 had called Wilson "an autocrat at the inspiration of the British government." Unlike Wilson, President Harding both supported the US-Russia trade deal and undermined the League of Nations by re-enforcing America's sovereignty, declaring bi-lateral treaties with Russia, Hungary and Austria outside of the league's control in 1921. The newly-formed British Roundtable Movement in America (set up as the Council on Foreign Relations ) were not pleased.

Just as Harding was maneuvering to recognize the Soviet Union and establish an entente with Lenin, the great president ate some "bad oysters" and died on August 2, 1923. While no autopsy was ever conducted, his death brought a decade of Anglophile Wall Street control into America and ended all opposition to World Government from the Presidency. This period resulted in the speculation-driven bubble of the roaring 20s whose crash on black Friday in 1929 nearly unleashed a fascist hell in America.

The Russia-Germany Rapallo Treaty is De-Railed

After months of organizing, leading representatives of Russia and Germany agreed to an alternative solution to the Versailles Treaty which would have given new life to Germany's patriots and established a powerful Russia-German friendship in Europe that would have upset other nefarious agendas.

Under the leadership of German Industrialist and Foreign Minster Walter Rathenau, and his counterpart Russian Foreign Minister Georgi Chicherin, the treaty was signed in Rapallo, Italy on April 16, 1922 premised upon the forgiveness of all war debts and a renouncement of all territorial claims from either side. The treaty said Russia and Germany would "co-operate in a spirit of mutual goodwill in meeting the economic needs of both countries."

When Rathenau was assassinated by a terrorist cell called the Organization Consul on June 24, 1922 the success of the Rapallo Treaty lost its steam and the nation fell into a deeper wave of chaos and money printing. The Organization Consul had taken the lead in the murder of over 354 German political figures between 1919-1923, and when they were banned in 1922, the group merely changed its name and morphed into other German paramilitary groups (such as the Freikorps) becoming the military arm of the new National Socialist Party.

1923: City of London's Solution is imposed

When the hyperinflationary blowout of Germany resulted in total un-governability of the state, a solution took the form of the Wall Street authored "Dawes Plan" which necessitated the use of a London-trained golem by the name of Hjalmar Schacht. First introduced as Currency Commissioner in November 1923 and soon President of the Reichsbank, Schacht's first act was to visit Bank of England's governor Montagu Norman in London who provided Schacht a blueprint for proceeding with Germany's restructuring. Schacht returned to "solve" the crisis with the very same poison that caused it.

First announcing a new currency called the "rentenmark" set on a fixed value exchanging 1 trillion reichsmarks for 1 new rentenmark, Germans were robbed yet again. This new currency would operate under "new rules" never before seen in Germany's history: Mass privatizations resulted in Anglo-American conglomerates purchasing state enterprises. IG Farben, Thyssen, Union Banking, Brown Brothers Harriman, Standard Oil, JP Morgan and Union Banking took control Germany's finances, mining and industrial interests under the supervision of John Foster Dulles, Montagu Norman, Averill Harriman and other deep state actors. This was famously exposed in the 1961 film Judgement at Nuremburg by Stanley Kramer.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/lbqDuUjm4aU?feature=oembed

Schacht next cut credit to industries, raised taxes and imposed mass austerity on "useless spending". 390 000 civil servants were fired, unions and collective bargaining was destroyed and wages were slashed by 15%.

As one can imagine, this destruction of life after the hell of Versailles was intolerable and civil unrest began to boil over in ways that even the powerful London-Wall Street bankers (and their mercenaries) couldn't control. An enforcer was needed unhindered by the republic's democratic institutions to force Schacht's economics onto the people. An up-and-coming rabble rousing failed painter who had made waves in a Beerhall Putsch on November 8, 1923 was perfect.

One Last Attempt to Save Germany

Though Hitler grew in power over the coming decade of Schachtian economics, one last republican effort was made to prevent Germany from plunging into a fascist hell in the form of the November 1932 election victory of General Kurt von Schleicher as Chancellor of Germany . Schleicher had been a co-architect of Rapallo alongside Rathenau a decade earlier and was a strong proponent of the Friedrich List Society's program of public works and internal improvements promoted by industrialist Wilhelm Lautenbach. The Nazi party's public support collapsed and it found itself bankrupt. Hitler had fallen into depression and was even contemplating suicide when "a legal coup" was unleashed by the Anglo-American elite resulting in Wall Street funds pouring into Nazi coffers.

By January 30, 1933 Hitler gained Chancellorship where he quickly took dictatorial powers under the "state of emergency" caused by the burning of the Reichstag in March 1933. By 1934 the Night of the Long Knives saw General Schleicher and hundreds of other German patriots assassinated and it was only a few years until the City of London-Wall Street Frankenstein monster stormed across the world.

How the 1929 Crash was Manufactured

While everyone knows that the 1929 market crash unleashed four years of hell in America which quickly spread across Europe under the great depression, not many people have realized that this was not inevitable, but rather a controlled blowout.

The bubbles of the 1920s were unleashed with the early death of President William Harding in 1923 and grew under the careful guidance of JP Morgan's President Coolidge and financier Andrew Mellon (Treasury Secretary) who de-regulated the banks, imposed austerity onto the country, and cooked up a scheme for Broker loans allowing speculators to borrow 90% on their stock. Wall Street was deregulated, investments into the real economy were halted during the 1920s and insanity became the norm. In 1925 broker loans totalled $1.5 billion and grew to $2.6 billion in 1926 and hit $5.7 billion by the end of 1927. By 1928, the stock market was overvalued fourfold!

When the bubble was sufficiently inflated, a moment was decided upon to coordinate a mass "calling in" of the broker loans. Predictably, no one could pay them resulting in a collapse of the markets. Those "in the know" cleaned up with JP Morgan's "preferred clients", and other financial behemoths selling before the crash and then buying up the physical assets of America for pennies on the dollar. One notable person who made his fortune in this manner was Prescott Bush of Brown Brothers Harriman, who went onto bailout a bankrupt Nazi party in 1932. These financiers had a tight allegiance with the City of London and coordinated their operations through the private central banking system of America's Federal Reserve and Bank of International Settlements.

The Living Hell that was the Great Depression

Throughout the Great depression, the population was pushed to its limits making America highly susceptible to fascism as unemployment skyrocketed to 25%, industrial capacity collapsed by 70%, and agricultural prices collapsed far below the cost of production accelerating foreclosures and suicide. Life savings were lost as 4000 banks failed.

This despair was replicated across Europe and Canada with eugenics-loving fascists gaining popularity across the board. England saw the rise of Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists in 1932, English Canada had its own fascist solution with the Rhodes Scholar "Fabian Society" League of Social Reconstruction (which later took over the Liberal Party) calling for the "scientific management of society". Time magazine had featured Il Duce over 6 times by 1932 and people were being told by that corporate fascism was the economic solution to all of America's economic woes.

In the midst of the crisis, the City of London removed itself from the gold standard in 1931 which was a crippling blow to the USA, as it resulted in a flight of gold from America causing a deeper contraction of the money supply and thus inability to respond to the depression. British goods simultaneously swamped the USA crushing what little production was left.

It was in this atmosphere that one of the least understood battles unfolded in 1933.

1932: A Bankers' Dictatorship is Attempted

In Germany, a surprise victory of Gen. Kurt Schleicher caused the defeat of the London-directed Nazi party in December 1932 threatening to break Germany free of Central Bank tyranny. A few weeks before Schleicher's victory, Franklin Roosevelt won the presidency in America threatening to regulate the private banks and assert national sovereignty over finance.

Seeing their plans for global fascism slipping away, the City of London announced that a new global system controlled by Central Banks had to be created post haste. Their objective was to use the economic crisis as an excuse to remove from nation states any power over monetary policy, while enhancing the power of Independent Central Banks as enforcers of "balanced global budgets". elaborate

In December 1932, an economic conference "to stabilize the world economy " was organized by the League of Nations under the guidance of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and Bank of England. The BIS was set up as "the Central Bank of Central Banks" in 1930 in order to facilitate WWI debt repayments and was a vital instrument for funding Nazi Germany- long after WWII began . The London Economic Conference brought together 64 nations of the world under a controlled environment chaired by the British Prime Minister and opened by the King himself.

A resolution passed by the Conference's Monetary Committee stated:

"The conference considers it to be essential, in order to provide an international gold standard with the necessary mechanism for satisfactory working, that independent Central Banks, with requisite powers and freedom to carry out an appropriate currency and credit policy, should be created in such developed countries as have not at present an adequate central banking institution" and that "the conference wish to reaffirm the great utility of close and continuous cooperation between Central Banks. The Bank of International Settlements should play an increasingly important part not only by improving contact, but also as an instrument for common action."

Echoing the Bank of England's modern fixation with "mathematical equilibrium", the resolutions stated that the new global gold standard controlled by central banks was needed "to maintain a fundamental equilibrium in the balance of payments" of countries. The idea was to deprive nation states of their power to generate and direct credit for their own development.

FDR Torpedoes the London Conference

Chancellor Schleicher's resistance to a bankers' dictatorship was resolved by a "soft coup" ousting the patriotic leader in favor of Adolph Hitler (under the control of a Bank of England toy named Hjalmar Schacht) in January 1933 with Schleicher assassinated the following year. In America, an assassination attempt on Roosevelt was thwarted on February 15, 1933 when a woman knocked the gun out of the hand of an anarchist-freemason in Miami resulting in the death of Chicago's Mayor Cermak.

Without FDR's dead body, the London conference met an insurmountable barrier, as FDR refused to permit any American cooperation. Roosevelt recognized the necessity for a new international system, but he also knew that it had to be organized by sovereign nation states subservient to the general welfare of the people and not central banks dedicated to the welfare of the oligarchy. Before any international changes could occur, nation states castrated from the effects of the depression had to first recover economically in order to stay above the power of the financiers.

By May 1933, the London Conference crumbled when FDR complained that the conference's inability to address the real issues of the crisis is "a catastrophe amounting to a world tragedy" and that fixation with short term stability were "old fetishes of so-called international bankers". FDR continued "The United States seeks the kind of dollar which a generation hence will have the same purchasing and debt paying power as the dollar value we hope to attain in the near future. That objective means more to the good of other nations than a fixed ratio for a month or two. Exchange rate fixing is not the true answer."

The British drafted an official statement saying "the American statement on stabilization rendered it entirely useless to continue the conference."

FDR's War on Wall Street

The new president laid down the gauntlet in his inaugural speech on March 4 th saying: "The money-changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit".

FDR declared a war on Wall Street on several levels, beginning with his support of the Pecorra Commission which sent thousands of bankers to prison, and exposed the criminal activities of the top tier of Wall Street's power structure who manipulated the depression, buying political offices and pushing fascism. Ferdinand Pecorra who ran the commission called out the deep state when he said "this small group of highly placed financiers, controlling the very springs of economic activity, holds more real power than any similar group in the United States."

Pecorra's highly publicized success empowered FDR to impose sweeping regulation in the form of 1) Glass-Steagall bank separation , 2) bankruptcy re-organization and 3) the creation of the Security Exchange Commission to oversee Wall Street. Most importantly, FDR disempowered the London-controlled Federal Reserve by installing his own man as Chair (Industrialist Mariner Eccles) who forced it to obey national commands for the first time since 1913, while creating an "alternative" lending mechanism outside of Fed control called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) which became the number one lender to infrastructure in America throughout the 1930s.

One of the most controversial policies for which FDR is demonized today was his abolishment of the gold standard. The gold standard itself constricted the money supply to a strict exchange of gold per paper dollar, thus preventing the construction of internal improvements needed to revive industrial capacity and put the millions of unemployed back to work for which no financial resources existed . It's manipulation by international financiers made it a weapon of destruction rather than creation at this time. Since commodity prices had fallen lower than the costs of production, it was vital to increase the price of goods under a form of "controlled inflation" so that factories and farms could become solvent and unfortunately the gold standard held that back. FDR imposed protective tariffs to favor agro-industrial recovery on all fronts ending years of rapacious free trade.

FDR stated his political-economic philosophy in 1934: "the old fallacious notion of the bankers on the one side and the government on the other side, as being more or less equal and independent units, has passed away. Government by the necessity of things must be the leader, must be the judge, of the conflicting interests of all groups in the community, including bankers."

The Real New Deal

Once liberated from the shackles of the central banks, FDR and his allies were able to start a genuine recovery by restoring confidence in banking. Within 31 days of his bank holiday, 75% of banks were operational and the FDIC was created to insure deposits. Four million people were given immediate work, and hundreds of libraries, schools and hospitals were built and staffed- All funded through the RFC. FDR's first fireside chat was vital in rebuilding confidence in the government and banks, serving even today as a strong lesson in banking which central bankers don't want you to learn about.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/iipnhLTdh-0?feature=oembed

From 1933-1939, 45 000 infrastructure projects were built. The many "local" projects were governed, like China's Belt and Road Initiative today, under a "grand design" which FDR termed the "Four Quarters" featuring zones of megaprojects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority area in the south east, the Columbia River Treaty zone on the northwest, the St Laurence Seaway zone on the North east, and Hoover Dam/Colorado zone on the Southwest. These projects were transformative in ways money could never measure as the Tennessee area's literacy rose from 20% in 1932 to 80% in 1950, and racist backwater holes of the south became the bedrock for America's aerospace industry due to the abundant and cheap hydropower. As I had already reported on the Saker , FDR was not a Keynesian (although it cannot be argued that hives of Rhodes Scholars and Fabians penetrating his administration certainly were).

Wall Street Sabotages the New Deal

Those who criticize the New Deal today ignore the fact that its failures have more to do with Wall Street sabotage than anything intrinsic to the program. For example, JP Morgan tool Lewis Douglass (U.S. Budget Director) forced the closure of the Civil Works Administration in 1934 resulting in the firing of all 4 million workers.

Wall Street did everything it could to choke the economy at every turn. In 1931, NY banks loans to the real economy amounted to $38.1 billion which dropped to only $20.3 billion by 1935. Where NY banks had 29% of their funds in US bonds and securities in 1929, this had risen to 58% which cut off the government from being able to issue productive credit to the real economy.

When, in 1937, FDR's Treasury Secretary persuaded him to cancel public works to see if the economy "could stand on its own two feet", Wall Street pulled credit out of the economy collapsing the Industrial production index from 110 to 85 erasing seven years' worth of gain, while steel fell from 80% capacity back to depression levels of 19%. Two million jobs were lost and the Dow Jones lost 39% of its value. This was no different from kicking the crutches out from a patient in rehabilitation and it was not lost on anyone that those doing the kicking were openly supporting Fascism in Europe. Bush patriarch Prescott Bush, then representing Brown Brothers Harriman was found guilty for trading with the enemy in 1942!

Coup Attempt in America Thwarted

The bankers didn't limit themselves to financial sabotage during this time, but also attempted a fascist military coup which was exposed by Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler in his congressional testimony of November 20, 1934. Butler had testified that the plan was begun in the Summer of 1933 and organized by Wall Street financiers who tried to use him as a puppet dictator leading 500 000 American Legion members to storm the White House. As Butler spoke, those same financiers had just set up an anti-New Deal organization called the American Liberty League which fought to keep America out of the war in defense of an Anglo-Nazi fascist global government which they wished to partner with.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/QQoBAc95tnw?feature=oembed

The American Liberty league only changed tune when it became evident that Hitler had become a disobedient Frankenstein monster who wasn't content in a subservient position to Britain's idea of a New World Order. In response to the Liberty League's agenda, FDR said "some speak of a New World Order, but it is not new and it is not order".

FDR's Anti-Colonial Post-War Vision

One of the greatest living testimonies to FDR's anti-colonial vision is contained in a little known 1946 book authored by his son Elliot Roosevelt who, as his father's confidante and aide, was privy to some of the most sensitive meetings his father participated in throughout the war. Seeing the collapse of the post-war vision upon FDR's April 12, 1945 death and the emergence of a pro-Churchill presidency under Harry Truman, who lost no time in dropping nuclear bombs on a defeated Japan, ushering in a Soviet witch hunt at home and launching a Cold War abroad, Elliot authored 'As He Saw It' (1946) in order to create a living testimony to the potential that was lost upon his father's passing.

As Elliot said of his motive to write his book:

"The decision to write this book was taken more recently and impelled by urgent events. Winston Churchill's speech at Fulton, Missouri, had a hand in this decision, the growing stockpile of American atom bombs is a compelling factor; all the signs of growing disunity among the leading nations of the world, all the broken promises, all the renascent power politics of greedy and desperate imperialism were my spurs in this undertaking And I have seen the promises violated, and the conditions summarily and cynically disregarded, and the structure of peace disavowed I am writing this, then, to you who agree with me that the path he charted has been most grievously -- and deliberately -- forsaken."

The Four Freedoms

Even before America had entered the war, the principles of international harmony which FDR enunciated in his January 6, 1941 Four Freedoms speech to the U.S. Congress served as the guiding light through every battle for the next 4.5 years. In this speech FDR said:

"In future days, which we seek to secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

"The first is the freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.

"The second is the freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.

"The third is the freedom from want -- which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.

"The fourth is freedom from fear -- which, translated into world terms, means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor -- anywhere in the world.

"That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

"To that new order, we oppose the greater conception -- the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.

"Since the beginning of American history, we have been engaged in change -- in a perpetual peaceful revolution -- a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly, adjusting itself to changing conditions -- without the concentration camp or the quicklime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.

"This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or to keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose."

Upon hearing these Freedoms outlined, American painter Norman Rockwell was inspired to paint four masterpieces that were displayed across America and conveyed the beauty of FDR's spirit to all citizens.

FDR's patriotic Vice President (and the man who SHOULD have been president in 1948) Henry Wallace outlined FDR's vision in a passionate video address to the people in 1942 which should also be watched by all world citizens today:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/_p2TQaUf3pQ?feature=oembed

Churchill vs FDR: The Clash of Two Paradigms

Elliot's account of the 1941-1945 clash of paradigms between his father and Churchill are invaluable both for their ability to shed light into the true noble constitutional character of America personified in the person of Roosevelt but also in demonstrating the beautiful potential of a world that SHOULD HAVE BEEN had certain unnatural events not intervened to derail the evolution of our species into an age of win-win cooperation, creative reason and harmony.

In As He Saw It, Elliot documents a conversation he had with his father at the beginning of America's entry into WWII, who made his anti-colonial intentions clear as day saying:

"I'm talking about another war, Elliott. I'm talking about what will happen to our world, if after this war we allow millions of people to slide back into the same semi-slavery!

"Don't think for a moment, Elliott, that Americans would be dying in the Pacific tonight, if it hadn't been for the shortsighted greed of the French and the British and the Dutch. Shall we allow them to do it all, all over again? Your son will be about the right age, fifteen or twenty years from now.

"One sentence, Elliott. Then I'm going to kick you out of here. I'm tired. This is the sentence: When we've won the war, I will work with all my might and main to see to it that the United States is not wheedled into the position of accepting any plan that will further France's imperialistic ambitions, or that will aid or abet the British Empire in its imperial ambitions."

This clash came to a head during a major confrontation between FDR and Churchill during the January 24, 1943 Casablanca Conference in Morocco. At this event, Elliot documents how his father first confronted Churchill's belief in the maintenance of the British Empire's preferential trade agreements upon which it's looting system was founded:

"Of course," he [FDR] remarked, with a sly sort of assurance, "of course, after the war, one of the preconditions of any lasting peace will have to be the greatest possible freedom of trade."

He paused. The P.M.'s head was lowered; he was watching Father steadily, from under one eyebrow.

"No artificial barriers," Father pursued. "As few favored economic agreements as possible. Opportunities for expansion. Markets open for healthy competition." His eye wandered innocently around the room.

Churchill shifted in his armchair. "The British Empire trade agreements" he began heavily, "are -- "

Father broke in. "Yes. Those Empire trade agreements are a case in point. It's because of them that the people of India and Africa, of all the colonial Near East and Far East, are still as backward as they are."

Churchill's neck reddened and he crouched forward. "Mr. President, England does not propose for a moment to lose its favored position among the British Dominions. The trade that has made England great shall continue, and under conditions prescribed by England's ministers."

"You see," said Father slowly, "it is along in here somewhere that there is likely to be some disagreement between you, Winston, and me.

"I am firmly of the belief that if we are to arrive at a stable peace it must involve the development of backward countries. Backward peoples. How can this be done? It can't be done, obviously, by eighteenth-century methods. Now -- "

"Who's talking eighteenth-century methods?"

"Whichever of your ministers recommends a policy which takes wealth in raw materials out of a colonial country, but which returns nothing to the people of that country in consideration. Twentieth-century methods involve bringing industry to these colonies. Twentieth-century methods include increasing the wealth of a people by increasing their standard of living, by educating them, by bringing them sanitation -- by making sure that they get a return for the raw wealth of their community."

Around the room, all of us were leaning forward attentively. Hopkins was grinning. Commander Thompson, Churchill's aide, was looking glum and alarmed. The P.M. himself was beginning to look apoplectic.

"You mentioned India," he growled.

"Yes. I can't believe that we can fight a war against fascist slavery, and at the same time not work to free people all over the world from a backward colonial policy."

"What about the Philippines?"

"I'm glad you mentioned them. They get their independence, you know, in 1946. And they've gotten modern sanitation, modern education; their rate of illiteracy has gone steadily down "

"There can be no tampering with the Empire's economic agreements."

"They're artificial "

"They're the foundation of our greatness."

"The peace," said Father firmly, "cannot include any continued despotism. The structure of the peace demands and will get equality of peoples. Equality of peoples involves the utmost freedom of competitive trade. Will anyone suggest that Germany's attempt to dominate trade in central Europe was not a major contributing factor to war?"

It was an argument that could have no resolution between these two men

The following day, Elliot describes how the conversation continued between the two men with Churchill stating:

"Mr. President," he cried, "I believe you are trying to do away with the British Empire. Every idea you entertain about the structure of the postwar world demonstrates it. But in spite of that" -- and his forefinger waved -- "in spite of that, we know that you constitute our only hope. And" -- his voice sank dramatically -- "you know that we know it. You know that we know that without America, the Empire won't stand."

Churchill admitted, in that moment, that he knew the peace could only be won according to precepts which the United States of America would lay down. And in saying what he did, he was acknowledging that British colonial policy would be a dead duck, and British attempts to dominate world trade would be a dead duck, and British ambitions to play off the U.S.S.R. against the U.S.A. would be a dead duck. Or would have been, if Father had lived."

This story was delivered in full during an August 15 lecture by the author:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/1IHVkJPfsx8?feature=oembed

FDR's Post-War Vision Destroyed

While FDR's struggle did change the course of history, his early death during the first months of his fourth term resulted in a fascist perversion of his post-war vision.

Rather than see the IMF, World Bank or UN used as instruments for the internationalization of the New Deal principles to promote long term, low interest loans for the industrial development of former colonies, FDR's allies were ousted from power over his dead body, and they were recaptured by the same forces who attempted to steer the world towards a Central Banking Dictatorship in 1933.

The American Liberty League spawned into various "patriotic" anti-communist organizations which took power with the FBI and McCarthyism under the fog of the Cold War. This is the structure that Eisenhower warned about when he called out "the Military Industrial Complex" in 1960 and which John Kennedy did battle with during his 900 days as president .

This is the structure which is out to destroy President Donald Trump and undo the November elections under a military coup and Civil War out of fear that a new FDR impulse is beginning to be revived in America which may align with the 21 st Century international New Deal emerging from China's Belt and Road Initiative and Eurasian alliance. French Finance Minister Bruno LeMaire and Marc Carney have stated their fear that if the Green New Deal isn't imposed by the west , then the New Silk Road and yuan will become the basis for the new world system.

The Bank of England-authored Green New Deal being pushed under the fog of COVID-19's Great Green Global Reset which promise to impose draconian constraints on humanity's carrying capacity in defense of saving nature from humanity have nothing to do with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and they have less to do with the Bretton Woods conference of 1944. These are merely central bankers' wet dreams for depopulation and fascism "with a democratic face" which their 1923 and 1933 efforts failed to achieve and can only be imposed if people remain blind to their own recent history.


Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , a BRI Expert on Tactical talk , and has authored 3 volumes of 'Untold History of Canada' book series . In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation


Taras 77 on September 19, 2020 , · at 6:16 pm EST/EDT

Remarkably detailed information, spot on=the bankers.

Still trying to wade thru and digest;

Thank you!

B.F. on September 21, 2020 , · at 2:26 am EST/EDT

Taras 77
Yes, a very interesting article, which explains much, but not everything. The question which need’s to be asked is who was FDR and how did he become President, ie. why was he permitted to become President. It should be taken into account that he was a 33 degree freemason, just like Truman. So, what really happened during the 1930’s ? The impression is that the US elite during that period was not united, being heterogeneous.

In 1917 Wall Street bankers finance the Russian “revolution”, when Lenin is brought to Russia from Switzerland, where he was living the high life, and when he was given 20 million dollars in gold to start an insurrection known as a “revolution”. The intent was to create a communist central government which would control Russian industry, raw materials and finances, and present them on a silver platter to Western bankers. The additional intent was the break up of Russia. The federal system was introduced, and artificial states like Ukraine were created within that system. These banker aspirations collapsed in 1924 when their puppet Lenin dies from syphilis and when Stalin assumes control, introducing industrialization.

The bankers then turn to Germany, when in 1925 an obscure character by the name of Adolf Hitler pops up. Before he is bestowed with power in 1933, the bankers in 1931 open the Bank of International Settlements in Basel, right next to the German border. It was this Bank which financed Hitler, his economic and banking “miracles”, as well as his upcoming war. As for Wall Street corporations, they of course invested in Germany, like Henry Ford, who built truck factories which provided the German Army with transport. Without Anglo-American involvement, there is no way that Hitler could have started World War Two. And what was the intention of Anglo-American bankers ? The break up and plundering of Russia, something that Stalin prevented, and something that in our age Putin also prevented.

And the US ? The bankers were obviously impressed what their puppet Adolf Hitler achieved, introducing dictatorship and at the same time placating the masses. They wanted the same thing in the US. This of course had to be prevented, as had the bankers succeeded with their planned fascist coup d’etat, then the game would have been up, as it would become obvious who was financing and controlling Hitler. I think that over this issue the US elite became divided. The group which backed FDR prevailed, as they wanted a covert modus operandi.

And FDR ? When did he join World War Two ? In December of 1941, when Stalin brought more than a million troops from Manchuria to Moscow, and when it became apparent that Hitler would be defeated, as he was. The Anglo-American elites feared that Russian troops would end up in Paris, as they did in 1814, when Napoleon was defeated. This, of course, had to be prevented. Also Hitler, the banker puppet, needed to be saved. His suicide in 1945 was more than suspicious, with historians “forgetting” to mention that his bunker had four escape tunnels (Hitler ostensibly commits suicide, while all of his staff manage to escape, with historians failing to explain how they did this. Did they, perhaps, use the four escape tunnels ?).

And what do we have today ? Unfortunately we have more of the same. What began in 1917 with the Russian revolution is still active. The Anglo-American bankers cannot forget their aim of breaking up and plundering Russia. Unfortunately for them, their little plan is taking too long. Their Praetorian Guard, NATO, is costing them billions. In 1971 Nixon takes the dollar off the gold standard, opening the way for mass printing and financial collapse, as mentioned in this article. On the other hand, Russia and it’s ally China have been stockpiling gold for years, preparing to introduce gold backed rubles and yuans, which of course needs to be prevented. The latest political machinations with Belarus and with Navalny in Russia are repeat performances of 1917, the West hoping for new insurrecions, ie. “revolutions”, where “democratic” leaders would be installed, little Guaidos. I think the West will see a financial crash first.

Tommy Apeiron on September 19, 2020 , · at 7:17 pm EST/EDT

“This is the structure which is out to destroy President Donald Trump and undo the November elections under a military coup and Civil War out of fear that a new FDR impulse is beginning to be revived in America which may align with the 21st Century international New Deal emerging from China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Eurasian alliance.”

I was with you until that sentence. Trump is in no way the new Franklin Roosevelt. He was put into office by a cabal of Zionists and banksters, the very same “money changers” that Roosevelt railed about in the 1930s, the very same that Jesus threw out of the Temple. They never forgave him for that, to this very day.

With the likes of Sheldon Adelson throwing “thirty pieces of silver” at him in the last days of the 2016 election and pulling strings with the Kosher Nostra to get him elected, Trump reciprocated by cancelling the Iran nuclear deal. That has set the stage for the war that will be the end of the USA as we know it. With the COVID-19 plandemic bearing down on us as well, Heaven only knows how this will all turn out.

John Mason on September 19, 2020 , · at 10:48 pm EST/EDT

Agree with you 100%; Trump is part and parcel of the so called deep state and his actions have verified his status, like you the article is very good until the second last paragraph referring to Trump.

Bro 93 on September 19, 2020 , · at 11:04 pm EST/EDT

It’s more complicated than that, Tommy.

In fact it’s a rather Slippery Conceptual Slope and there are a great many…especially Commonwealth Lefties that just can’t seem to keep their footing….and slide right (or left, as the case may be) off The Path….so reliably …as programmed by the Masters of Ideological Left/Right Mind Control.

But there’s HOPE:

Today’s Anti-Mask anti-Lockdown demonstration in London’s Trafalgar Square:

https://youtu.be/ODZjhOA0QQE?t=3122

Oh, HORRORS!

Is that a Red MAGA hat on one of the demonstrators??? (sarc)

Finally, more of y’all are getting it……AND ..not slipping and sliding off course as predictably….and obediently…. as before.

Tommy Apeiron on September 20, 2020 , · at 8:42 am EST/EDT

You’re right, Bro, it is more complicated than that. It’s more complicated than we could even begin to understand. But, understand this: We have troops in the Middle East because Israel wants them there, pure and simple. Even Trump understands that. We are threatening Iran because Israel wants us to. The Likudniks and Zionists who Trump has surrounded himself with are driving the USA into a war with Iran and Russia that no one but them really want. It’s all part of their crazy “end times” ideology. The “synagogue of Satan” is prepared to march us all right over a cliff. Americans of faith need to get their heads out their asses and put a stop to this madness.

Little Black Duck on September 21, 2020 , · at 12:47 am EST/EDT

Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer?

The bad guys are godless bastards and don’t want to die in a firestorm I wouldn’t think.
They are practicing divide and rule to the extent that we let them.

Tommy Apeiron on September 21, 2020 , · at 7:58 am EST/EDT

I’m thinking the “bad guys” aren’t even human anymore, maybe some AI profit algorithm like what controls the hedge funds these days. They certainly have no use for most humans, although they may keep a few of us around as pets.

emersonreturn on September 20, 2020 , · at 12:42 pm EST/EDT

absolutely agree. i’m not sure why ehert believes trump is anything but a tool but he’s put this idea forth in several essays now. i also do not fully agree with cabal signing on with the bri, yes, undoubtedly they will have to but china (russia as well) are well acquainted with the cabal & will have no illusions about their ends. if or rather when the cabal realizes it has no choice but to join it will be as a very controlled minor player never to be trusted. neither china nor russia has suffered this long journey to recovery to then hand its control over to the cabal yet again. i read last week (middleeastmonitor i believe) that egypt is about to teach chinese in its schools. the world is indeed changing.

Snow Leopard on September 20, 2020 , · at 6:37 pm EST/EDT

Regarding Trump; the Saker has covered this issue well in a recent post. It is not a matter of what we think of Trump. It is a matter of what the banking Cabal thinks of him. They make it pretty obvious that they regard him as insufficiently under their own control. They fear his loyalty to America. He is not as totally bought as the democrats. This for them is a threat. The cabal wants a President that is totally under their control. For them Trump does not cut it. So they cleverly provide as much ammunition in their controlled media as they can find to reinforce the people’s dislike of him. Not a difficult task obviously. Divide and rule works. Particularly in America where politics is reduced to a personality contest.

Bobm on September 21, 2020 , · at 2:42 am EST/EDT

It’s complicated? No, the truth is just obscured by all the theater. It’s something like this …

For the first time in decades we have a potus that is not directly serving the ptb. This is intolerable for the ptb, hence the deep state revolt against him.

Trump got into office because he promised the likudniks things that the ptb denied to them because they conflicted with their interests

But on the issue of “the great replacement”, Trump is an obstacle to the ptb.

pablo on September 20, 2020 , · at 6:17 pm EST/EDT

nearly every name ,company,movement, politician mentioned in the article is connected by freemasonry and “the money changers” . When individually looked at its readily available to see. but when asked to step back and see a bigger world view. it becomes tin foil time cognitive palsy for most.
trump ? just look at his photo ops with satans sidekick himself kissinger.

Little Black Duck on September 21, 2020 , · at 12:41 am EST/EDT

Yes, but to what extent is that needed in order to stay in the game?
President Kennedy tried a more aggressive approach.

Grieved on September 19, 2020 , · at 8:16 pm EST/EDT

Thank you. Matthew Ehret, for your scholarly detail, and your persistence in trying to present this story, in a world that has whitewashed it out of the culture. This long piece was to my mind one of your best presentations yet. We should all be very grateful.

I had watched Wallace’s speech before, but this time, in the context you provided, it became stunningly clear that the FDR school of thought regarded the socialist revolution as a real thing around the world, and as a very American thing, ongoing for a century and a half here, and not yet completed, as the revolution of the worker towards freedom from want continued – and was intended to continue.

And this all should have continued, except that those who love money do not hesitate for one second to kill anyone whom they deem it expedient to kill – perhaps this is the truest lesson of all that the people must always hold in their thinking.

What a different world we could be living in today but for the greed of a few people who all along have regarded the rest of humanity as nothing. No wonder they hate China, for continuing that revolution that they killed in the United States – IF, in fact, it has been killed.

Our revolution continues – the President’s man told us so. And they will kill anyone they have to in order to defeat this revolution – our best general told us so.

Thank you for the continual reminders, Matthew Ehret.

RMM on September 20, 2020 , · at 12:19 pm EST/EDT

The hatred of China is recent, and currently over-dramatized by Trump, mostly for own reasons. And the neocons still think there are means to “contain” China’s economic growth (they will fail’), while Russia’s sabotage of an increasing number of their evil plots around the world is hard to prevent.
Consequently, Russia remains the greater threat for the empire, as Putin has been increasingly frustrating their second biggest tool for control after the $ – regime change. Belarus, Venezuela, Syria, to which should be added Turkey, and other less known spanners in the wheels.
And of course, Crimea, which the regime-changers refuse to get over…
Worse of all: the new weapons.
And to add insult to injury, the vaccine with the nose-thumb name, Sputnik V.
The cumulative effect of these steps is proving so irritating that Matthew Ehret’s warning about a neocon-driven “total war with Russia, China…” should be taken seriously.
Certainly Putin does, if this statement is anything to go by:
“And since Dec. 2019, the first strategic missile regiment with the Avangard system has been on full combat alert.” (See here for context: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64058 )

Connor on September 19, 2020 , · at 8:34 pm EST/EDT

Excellent historical link up of City of London + Wall st + JSOC/CIA/Deep state. At present it seems to be the Left is Right and the Right is Left. Again like it was over 90+ years ago the distraction of a DEM v GOP ensures we lose sight of the bigger picture.

Paul Smith on September 20, 2020 , · at 1:24 am EST/EDT

Better link for the Banking with H—-r https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x537w3l

Katherine on September 20, 2020 , · at 9:45 pm EST/EDT

Excellent!

the adverts are a bit annoying but it looks as though there is no other way to view this film other than the link provided.

The info on how sovereign wealth (gold) was stolen is incredible. Just moved from one vault to the other at either the BIS or the Bank of England!! And gold stolen from Czechoslovakia, Austria, and POland was used by the Reich to make interest and dividend payments to the Bank of England!

Really great film WW2 footage that I haven’t seen elsewhere, and interviews with members of the Greatest Generation, many of them intelligent women who were on the scene.

A great companion film to The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire.

The takeaway: Don’t trust bankers! Especially not international bankers. The summary at the end is: They like to have a quiet life, just keep making money regardless of who is in power or who wins. They all fraternized throughout the war. Especially Chase. That is Rockefeller, in case you forgot . . .

Katherine

djole on September 21, 2020 , · at 2:00 am EST/EDT

They did not stole Gold reserves of Austria. Fake news.

Zidar on September 20, 2020 , · at 12:04 am EST/EDT

Thank you. Amazing text and great insights into original documents. I have learned a lot from the text and the links. Many things mentioned in the text, I have heard before, by reading Episodes on Oriental Review (it is on the list of news sources on the top of this page), written by Nikolay Starikov. However, Starikov being a Russian, can hardly be used as a reference in discussions with readers from US. Now I have another source to point to – a fellow Canadian, eh :-)

Thank you again

Robert Shule on September 20, 2020 , · at 3:16 am EST/EDT

History all very well, but I believe we have a situation in the world today unlike anything mankind has experienced in the past. Thus, most unfortuneately there exists no guidance, no lessons that could be learned from. In the course of the last century world population has exponentially grown to a size that the planet cannot comfortably support. Energy, nature, social, and economic systems are being stressed beyond their limits as humankind is out to drown in its own guano. The problem is not in our ability to produce, but in our inability to get rid of the excess, i.e. the byproducts. The West’s culture of glutten provides no avail. Scientists know this, and have been warning for quite a long time, but too few are listening. So yes, as Mr. Ehret points out we are in a slow motion world order meltdown in many dimensions, but not because of political machinations (although the political machinations certainly aid the quandary.) Rather, at the root, it is because of technical-biological formations overwhelming the world’s natuaral orders, and these formations also promise to overwhelm any world order that the planet’s oligarchies are willing to accept . Our world leaders are totally lost. They do not know what to do as there is no past history they can grasp on to even if they cared to do so. China’s belt and road inititive is hardly a solution as it will only exasperate the basic problem of a world seriously overpopulated wanting to live like one hundred million gluttonous Americans did fifty years ago.
I only feel for the young people who will inherit this mess as the older generations have become too decrepit to even acknowledge the situation.

Geneva Observer on September 20, 2020 , · at 3:13 pm EST/EDT

In 1949 when Chairman Mao came to power, the population numbered about 1.0 billion, the average life expectancy was 42 years, literacy was about 2%, opium addiction was about 25%. Health care was non-existant except to a privileged few. Children had to look after their elderly parents.

Today the population is 1.4 billion, average life expectancy is 78 years, literacy is about 98% and opium addiction is almost irrelevant.

You will not read this from the priests at the Club of Rome. It is not in their interest.

You should be celebrating one of the most extra-ordinary successes in history. Over 500 million people have been lifted from a life of abject poverty to a decent standard of living with education, health care and a pension, in other words, a life worth living.

The world population will obviously have to rise as people live longer. This was one reason for the one child policy that was persistently applied in China for decades. This does create a burden on the care of elderly. Technology makes it less so.

China is converting its electricity plants from coal to gas and nuclear, greatly reducing air and water pollution. China is not just a low wage country. It has learned over the last decades to be the most efficient, high quality producer of goods and services.

Above all their belt and road initiative offers a great deal for its partners, a win-win situation. No other developed nation offers so much hence the trade war.

Nussiminen on September 20, 2020 , · at 3:45 am EST/EDT

”In June 1922, 300 marks exchanged $1 US and in November 1923, it took 42 trillion marks to get $1 US!”

Matthew Ehret doesn’t mention it, but what started the monstrous hyperinflation instantly was the occupation of the Ruhr by French and Belgian troops (January 1923) as ”due compensation” for Germany defaulting on war reparation payments. Germany found herself asset-stripped of her own industry and, without any colonies to rob blind, resorted to print money with no backing. This is something which ominously haunts the collective West ever since: What will happen if and when the Oppressor Nations — now deindustrialised and with abysmal birth stats (except in immigrant communities) — can’t coerce other countries and peoples into upholding any of this ’post-industrial’ nonsense anymore? Fascism is a consummate expression of militant parasitism, with or without any racist depravities pertaining to it.

Matthew Ehret is dead right about the remedy: Kick out rapacious speculative finance and join the BRI project which will eradicate poverty, hunger, and war by creating durable infrastructure. The neocon filth doesn’t even qualify as fascists. They are anti-Life, pure and simple.

Gerry on September 20, 2020 , · at 12:10 pm EST/EDT

I remember reading years ago a sentence from Keynes about the disaster that was Versailles:

“Men will not always die quietly…In their distress they may overturn the remnants of organization, and submerge civilization itself.”

and further:

“but who can say… in what direction men will seek at last to escape their misfortunes.”

Unbelievable, how bankers gamble with the worlds population and then came what? The nuclear deterrent, “MAD” lol and the cry for a one world government.

and now O look their all pointing their ICBM’s at us?

Paul on September 20, 2020 , · at 4:40 am EST/EDT

I wonder what the modern day “Reichstagsbrand” would look like.

Anonymous on September 20, 2020 , · at 6:26 pm EST/EDT

“… I wonder what the modern day “Reichstagsbrand” would look like …”

This is how:

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/07/14/20/0D7A129100000578-3690818-image-a-84_1468523552255.jpg

Dr.NG Maroudas on September 20, 2020 , · at 11:55 pm EST/EDT

Right, Con-911 was the 21st century Reichstagsbrand. And it has been followed as the night follows the day by Con-19, the 21st century version of Gleich-Gestaltung (Uniform Viewpoint) with Lockdown, Mass Incarceration of suspects, and biological Reprogramming with forcible injection of genetic material.

Harry_Red on September 20, 2020 , · at 5:11 am EST/EDT

Fascinating article and very well written. Leaning more towards scholarly work.

The shear evil, cunning and intelligence of the British Elite is amazing and unprecedented from a historical perspective.

Hence the “Anglo“ in the Anglo-Zionist Empire (Alliance).

Roberto on September 20, 2020 , · at 6:22 am EST/EDT

Please would you link, point to any reference for this:
“A leading US industrialist named Washington Baker Vanderclip ….agreement in history with Russia to the tune of $3 billion in 1920”

Jean-Pierre James Elsener on September 21, 2020 , · at 5:03 am EST/EDT

Washington Baker Vanderclip was seemingly president of the Elkhart Masonic Mutual Life Association from Elkhart, Indiana ( https://tinyurl.com/y2vnjktc ).

I guess the guy in question is not Vanderclip but a business man named ‘Washington Baker Vanderlip’.

Vanderlip was also known as ‘The Khan from Kamchatka’.

He was often confused by the Russians with the banker Frank Vanderlip from the First National City Bank. Might well be the case they were under the impression dealing with the banker when matter of fact they were talking to the business man.

W.B. Vanderlip acted as a kind of semi-official US ambassador before the US established diplomatic relations with the back then Soviet Union in 1933.

You shall find numerous references by searching for ‘The Khan from Kamchatka’ in history books from the time of the Russian revolution.

common man on September 20, 2020 , · at 6:42 am EST/EDT

Absolutely brilliant. To be read and reread. I will recommend it to my family and friends. A must to understand the dangers and opportunities of the current situation. Thank You Mr Ehret.

djole on September 20, 2020 , · at 7:39 am EST/EDT

Is there any chance that someone put together in the same format of article, connection between City and catholic Kuria in Vatikan. This would than cover everything.

Thanks

Tsader on September 20, 2020 , · at 11:04 am EST/EDT

Yeah sure, lots of details but also lots none factual details that have been randomly connected to events at the author’s discretion without any references to back up the claims, especially when it comes to National Socialistic Germany and Hitler. Usually, a topic that has been willfully ignored academically as well as scientifically since its destruction.
Hence, we always get to hear the same nonsense over and over

Serbian girl on September 20, 2020 , · at 11:10 am EST/EDT

Reading this article one gets the impression it was exclusively foreign money that funded the rise of Hitler.

Why is there no mention of prominent domestic funding?

For example:
Kurt von Schroeder a German banker from Cologne who participated in the financing of the Nazi party and was a director of the Keppler Circle (together with Hjalmar Schacht ) which grouped together German businessmen who were sympathetic to the Nazis.

August Thyssen the German industrialist bought the “Brown House” in Munich which became the Nazi HQ. The imposing building basically functioned as “state within a state” in the Weimar Republic.

Albert Voegler, the founder of Vereinigte Stahlwerk AG funded the Nazis and was one of the main beneficiaries of re-armament.

Also, not sure how one can describe Kurt Von Schleicher, a Nazi who paved the way for Hitler to become Chancellor, as a “patriot”?

Anonymous on September 20, 2020 , · at 6:55 pm EST/EDT

Wilhelm Keppler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Keppler

Keppler Kreis – Freundeskreis der Wirtschaft (Circle of Friends of the Economy): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freundeskreis_der_Wirtschaft

Kurt Baron von Schröder: https://museenkoeln.de/NS-DOKUMENTAtionszentrum/medien/abb/368/4443_6530.jpg , https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Freiherr_von_Schr%C3%B6der

Braunes Haus, München: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Bundesarchiv_Bild_102-17059%2C_M%C3%BCnchen%2C_Braunes_Haus.jpg
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braunes_Haus

etc…

Pamela on September 20, 2020 , · at 12:13 pm EST/EDT

“Britain was the leading in hand behind (..) WWI”

“the British oligarchy managed the war,”

It makes it hard for me to continue reading this. I’m sick to death of this total refusal to take a tiny bit of trouble to examine what is meant by “Britain”. The Island of Britain holds 3 people; the Cymraeg, the Gaelic and the AngloSaxon.
Since the AngloSaxon, more accurately designated from genetic studied as Franco-Germanic hybrids – invaded the land before the turn of the millenia under the pretext of coming to aid the Cymraeg who inhabited and owned the entire island up to the northern border with Pictish and Gaelic tribes, and were under attack by the same Picts – but took and relabeled stolen land “Angle-Land”, the Island has been dominated by the AngloSaxons and a few aristocratic Normans, known after a few hundred years as “English”.

To the Cymraeg they are still “Saxons”.

Every ruling power over the island since those days has been English. Few Gaels or Celts have been in any position of power, since the concept of Aristocracy was absorbed by the English by their Norman forbears and to this day is clung to like immovable glue. The attitude of English aristocracy towards us has been one of utter contempt and loathing. Only one Cymraeg was ever Prime Minister and that was the highly charismatic David Lloyd George, for whom English was a second language. He fought and fought against all those moneyed powers stop WWI, and when he failed because of the power of group action, did all he could to prevent the worst excesses.

The people being talked of here are primarily the English Aristocracy and Landed “Gentry” as they call themselves, which includes the Royal Family line [primarily Germanic, brought in by that Aristocracy to make sure the Gaelic or Scottish in line for the throne didn’t inherit it], and the City of London, a city and power unto itself. It’s the entire unimaginably wealthy class, which is not subject to most of the Laws of Britain, being a power unto itself; it is comprised of Jewish, English and other power-brokers and oligarchs.

There are NO “oligarchs ” who are Celtic or Gaelic.

So – forget we exist if you want, but for Gods sake stop just grouping us with our first and only real enemy, the English, under the title THEY invented —- “Britain”.

djole on September 20, 2020 , · at 1:48 pm EST/EDT

Thumb up. Can you write an article on this topic for the Saker blog so everyone can see what it is about.
Thank you

Anonymous on September 20, 2020 , · at 2:33 pm EST/EDT

Just watched a movie about the IRA from the mid 80’s. How is it that they were lamenting about the ”British” and not the ”English” and that on the walls of Belfast it read ”Beware Brits”?

Kapricorn4 on September 21, 2020 , · at 3:00 am EST/EDT

The people of Northern Ireland are Protestant Christians, who split off from the Roman Catholics of Eire in 1920.

This has been the major cause of the violence in Belfast ever since. The Catholics wish to unite with Eire (Southern Ireland), but the Protestants want to remain part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland having representation in Westminster.

Uncle Bob on September 21, 2020 , · at 3:37 am EST/EDT

That is partly correct.But the Catholic population is around 45% of the country.And the Protestant around 55%.When the British kept the 6 counties they went too far. Fermanagh,and Tyrone,were very majority Catholic.And Derry and Armagh,were close to half Catholic.Of the other two,Down was around a third Catholic in its South region. And the industrial Antrim with Belfast,had large workingclass Catholic ghetto’s in Belfast. Had they cut the borders by a lot they could have had a mostly Protestant area.But to do so would leave only a tiny area to them.And they wanted a bigger region.

Katherine on September 20, 2020 , · at 5:54 pm EST/EDT

I don’t think that Ehret has to undertake a genetic study of the British Isles before he can write up this analysis of the role of the British ruling class/oligarchy/monarchy in fomenting both WW1 and WW2.

I too would like to see more documentation of US-Russian cooperation between the wars.

From my recent reading I think Ehret does miss an important point regarding WW1, which is the role of the hawk faction in Austro-Hungary and its failed plan to do a surgical “cakewalk” type of punishment of Serbia for the assassination in Sarejevo (Franz Ferdinand had actually been a “dove” re Serbia). But the fact was that militarists in both Germany and Russia wanted war and put tremendous pressure on both Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas, his cousin, to go to war. Possibly also in Britain. Britain certainly did fear the growing clout of quickly industrializing Germany and wanted to nip it in the bud. And Churchill was salivating over gaining territory and control for Britain from the Ottoman Empire

Especially as Germany was already building the Berlin-Baghdad Railway, which would have provided access to the newly discovered oil fields of the Ottoman Empire (now Iraq, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc.). Germany certainly had the brainpower in chemistry, physics, engineering, etc. to complete the railroad as far as the Persian Gulf and to develop the oil fields and develop and manage all of the refinery infrastructure and processes.

Then there was that little issue of a Jewish homeland. Unfortunately David Lloyd George, for all of his good deeds at home, can be practically be described as a militant Christian Zionist. The Palestine idea was always there in the background as Britain teed up for the Great One. Arguably the Balfour Declaration would have gone nowhere without the active support of George to create a Jewish enclave, and British imperial toehold, in the Middle East. Please, we should not assume that the imperialists were unable to read maps.

But back to Britain and the postwar era, a very relevant complement to Ehret’s analysis is this excellent documentary film, about the creation of offshore tax havens by the City of London:
The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YgFDZNXPyg

Katherine

Katerina on September 20, 2020 , · at 6:10 pm EST/EDT

Pamela, we seem to be “on same page” quite a few times and what is remarkable, that is exactly what riles me when they say “British”, when the obvious evil doers are the English! Plain and simple, but most people fail to make that distinction. By the way, I have promised Saker another essay on that very subject – the global evil that eminated and continues to eminate from that particular “race”, group or whatever one can call them. That oppressive, domineering, imperialistic mindset that believes only in subjugation and enslavement of others and that is why there is such deep, all-consuming hatred towards Russia and Russians, who are radically opposite to them in their understanding of living in this world. I want to address that and expand on it. Give me a month or so. : )

Pamela on September 20, 2020 , · at 12:21 pm EST/EDT

If you truly want to understand the causes of Hyperinflation I can suggest no better source than Mike Moloney’s “GoldSilver.com” site. He presents plenty of graphs and economic history to show exactly how it is caused, what trends it is a part of , and why it is now totally unavoidable.

Regarding this piece, I have nothing to say for anyone who says that David Lloyd George, the first and best true Socialist P.M. the people of the British Isle ever had, and who formed what was the best Welfare state before it was ruined, was part of a drive for Global domination. He was in a position of power as P.M. and therefor was a part of many Committee’s but to suggest this ardent socialist and fighter for the rights of man was a side kick to Globalism is just beyond discussion.

Anonymous on September 20, 2020 , · at 1:09 pm EST/EDT

The Anglo American Empire is certainly desperate–like a rabid beast frothing at the mouth.

As such, America increasingly lashes out with geopolitical provocations and threats, as it feels its global hegemony slipping through its grasp.

Amid mounting domestic crisis, US imperialism lashes out at Russia and China
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/01/pers-s01.html?view=print

Per/Norway on September 20, 2020 , · at 2:16 pm EST/EDT

Here is a Roosevelt As he saw it link that you do not need an archive. org account to read.

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.81973/page/n19/mode/2up

Kapricorn4 on September 20, 2020 , · at 8:24 pm EST/EDT

This article is an excellent narrative concerning international politics. However, contrary to accepted financial wisdom, the rise of Germany from 1933 onwards under Hitler was not financed by international bankers. Quite the opposite in fact,

The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 had imposed draconian war reparations on Germany, because they had just lost the 1914-18 world war and had to be punished by the international bankers. It was they who caused the hyperinflation of the German Mark that occurred in 1922 in order to pay off the war loans incurred by France and England by printing more and more money that Germany had to borrow at interest. This caused the breakdown of the German economy with massive unemployment and the social discontent that led to the eventual rise of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany.

In 1933 Hitler canceled Germany’s debts and created debt free money as Treasury certificates that were paid to the German workforce for work done and/or materials supplied. This enabled the rejuvenation of the German economy building railroads, autobahns and the manufacture of war materiel resulting in full employment and prosperity to the nation.

The international bankers were aghast at this transformation and that is why Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, since the rise of German power would threaten to destroy the British Empire.

Jamshyd on September 21, 2020 , · at 12:40 am EST/EDT

This is correct. The Germans went against the banks. That is why today we equate Nazi Germany with mad racist baby eaters.

I don’t believe we have ever been told the true history of WW2.

Serbian girl on September 21, 2020 , · at 8:40 am EST/EDT

Kaprocorn, Hitler’s rise was fuelled by credit. Read up on MEFOBILLS. It was a deferred payment system. He did not “create debt free money”. Credit will give you an economic high for a while…Hitler milked it for what it was worth and then just before the debts became due, he waged Blitzkrieg and stole his neighbors’ gold reserves.

Jamshyd, since Hitler was financed by bankers how was he “against the bankers”?? And, yes the Nazis were racist baby eaters.

Btw, Hitler also supported the cause of Zionism. Haavara agreement promoted the settlement of Jews in the British Mandate of Palestine.

Cyril on September 20, 2020 , · at 11:03 pm EST/EDT

Thank you, Matthew Ehret, for a fine work.

Until now, I have never heard of FDR’s Four Freedoms (freedom of speech; freedom of worship; freedom from want; and freedom from fear (of war, e.g.)). My ignorance probably says something about the overwhelming completeness of the Banksters’ Putsch that occurred after FDR’s death.

Learning about the Four Freedoms reminds me of the soaring opening phrases of the United Nations Charter:

We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind ….

This is completely consistent with the Four Freedoms. I see now that FDR must have been one of the primary creators of the UN — an enormous achievement. The UN Charter, and the Four Freedoms, should be celebrated throughout the USA. I wonder why they aren’t?

[Sep 20, 2020] The Danger Of Fascism With The Death Of RBG by Barkley Rosser

Allegations that a group or a political figure is neo-fascist are usually hotly contested, especially when the term is used as a political epithet . The traits that provoke such an epithet include usually includes ultranationalism, some kind of racial supremacy, extreme authoritarianism, and xenophobia. Connection of the political movement or a politician to intelligence service( in the USA to CIA) are more rarely used but Bush Senior was often called a fascist.
From Fascism in North America - Wikipedia "American intellectuals paid considerable attention to Mussolini, but few became his supporters. He did have popular support in the Italian American community.[19][20]
In the so-called Business Plot in 1933, anti-war speaker Smedley Butler claimed that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans' organization and use it in a coup d'état to overthrow American President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1934, Butler testified to the Special Committee on Un-American Activities (the "McCormack-Dickstein Committee") on these claims. Dickstein, however, was a paid Soviet spy, and historians have not identified any business leaders as a plotter.[21]
During the 1930s Virgil Effinger led the paramilitary Black Legion, a violent offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan that sought a revolution to establish fascism in the United States.[22] Although responsible for a number of attacks, the Black Legion was very much a peripheral band of militants. More important were the Silver Legion of America, founded in 1933 by William Dudley Pelley, and the German American Bund, which emerged the same year from a number of older groups, including the Friends of New Germany and the Free Society of Teutonia. Both of these groups looked to Nazism for their inspiration.
While these groups enjoyed some support, they were largely peripheral. A more prominent leader, Father Charles Coughlin, sparked concern among some on the left at the time. Coughlin, who publicly endorsed fascism, was unable to become involved in active politics because of his status as a priest.[23] Other fascists active in the US included the publisher Seward Collins, the broadcaster Robert Henry Best, the inventor Joe McWilliams and the writer Ezra Pound.
Sep 20, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

I try to avoid these terms like "fascism," but it has become clear that Donald J. Trump actively seeks to become an at least authoritarian leader of the US...


Bert Schlitz , September 20, 2020 3:49 pm

Fascism??? Nope. Zionism, yup. It's a form.

September 20, 2020 6:44 pm

We probably need to distinguish between fascism and neo-fascism. Those are two different social models.

Fascism proper name is "national socialism." It is different from "national neoliberalism" as advocated by Trump. In many ways, Classic Fascism strongly correlates with the mental state of nation which is attacked by strong enemy, the enemy which has supporters inside the country. It was also a revolt against financial oligarchy while masking it with the particular national identity, due to historical for Europe over-representation of Jews in financial industry. The distinct feature of fascism is its strong aversion to the excessive financialization of economy and banking, which fascists consider evil.

Often it is also connected with the attempt of modernization of the country "from above."

The classic fascism involve charismatic leader, unhinged militarism, cult of the army, unhinged nationalism and cult of personal scarifies in the name of the country, violence against opponents and the rejection of parliamentary democracy.

National socialism model of the state was the first which emphasized the key role on intelligence agencies in suppressing of the dissent and as a tool of infiltration into opposition. Surveillance of the population became vital state function. It was fascism that invented the role of intelligence agencies as the major part of oppressive apparatus of the state. It re-invented "political police" on a new level in the form of Gestapo.

For the most part (and that's why many researchers do not consider Franco regime as a proper fascist state) t also was defined by openly proclaimed goal of external expansion. In this sense it is not unlike neoliberal states with the only difference in tools -- direct army occupation vs. indirect occupation via financial capital penetration and subjugation of nation via debt and the control of its elite (debt slave mechanism)

Scapegoated ethnic minorities was typical only for selected national variants and first of all for the German variant, (where it were Jews and Gypsies.)

BTW the formal program of NSDAP (not that they intended to implement it) was to the left of the current Democratic Party Platform

.
The 25-point Program of the NSDAP

7. We demand that the state be charged first with providing the opportunity for a livelihood and way of life for the citizens. If it is impossible to sustain the total population of the State, then the members of foreign nations (non-citizens) are to be expelled from the Reich.
8. Any further immigration of non-citizens is to be prevented. We demand that all non-Germans, who have immigrated to Germany since 2 August 1914, be forced immediately to leave the Reich.
9.All citizens must have equal rights and obligations.
10.The first obligation of every citizen must be to work both spiritually and physically. The activity of individuals is not to counteract the interests of the universality, but must have its result within the framework of the whole for the benefit of all. Consequently, we demand:
11.Abolition of unearned (work and labor) incomes. Breaking of debt (interest)-slavery.
12.In consideration of the monstrous sacrifice in property and blood that each war demands of the people, personal enrichment through a war must be designated as a crime against the people. Therefore, we demand the total confiscation of all war profits.
13.We demand the nationalization of all (previous) associated industries (trusts).
14.We demand a division of profits of all heavy industries.
15.We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare.
16.We demand the creation of a healthy middle class and its conservation, immediate communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low cost to small firms, the utmost consideration of all small firms in contracts with the State, county or municipality.
17.We demand a land reform suitable to our needs, provision of a law for the free expropriation of land for the purposes of public utility, abolition of taxes on land and prevention of all speculation in land.
18.We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, profiteers and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race.

21.The State is to care for the elevating national health by protecting the mother and child, by outlawing child-labor, by the encouragement of physical fitness, by means of the legal establishment of a gymnastic and sport obligation, by the utmost support of all organizations concerned with the physical instruction of the young.
22. We demand abolition of the mercenary troops and formation of a national army.

Neo-fascism is something very different and less defined. It is unclear if Trump's "national neoliberalism" can be classified as neo-fascism (which in a very simplified meaning is fascism within the bounds of parliamentary democracy) . I am not an expert on the topic. But clearly several things simply do not match. First of all is should strives, at least on the level of program, to raise the standard of living of lower 80% of population. This is not the case with Trump.

Terry , September 20, 2020 7:28 pm

...Mostly, I am concerned that SCOTUS will become a rubber stamp for the oligarchs...

I do not know whether it is fascism, neither whatever or just the " law of the jungle", but it is bad.

Bert Schlitz , September 20, 2020 8:26 pm

Classical Fascism is just socialism, with violent tribalism. Soviet Russia went into this as well by 1928, became known as social fascism as they starved nonrussian areas of the Soviet to industrialize rapidly in roughly 10 years.

What's stupidly called neofascism now is just zionist/conservative authoritarianism. Progressive authoritarianism is from Millsian liberalism, which many people do not get.

Fred C. Dobbs September 21, 2020 11:34 am

'Classical Fascism is just socialism, with violent tribalism.'

Fascism, as instituted by Benito Mussolini, is certainly NOT 'just socialism'. Wikipedia: Italian Fascism (Italian: fascismo italiano), also known as Classical Fascism or simply Fascism, is the original fascist ideology as developed in Italy by Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini. The ideology is associated with a series of two political parties led by Benito Mussolini …

Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) September 21, 2020 12:11 pm @Fred,

THX. Perhaps Nationalist Socialist was taken too literally there. In practice, Fascism was actually devoutly anti=socialist.

Also, congrats on your Boston Globe post given a thread.

[Sep 20, 2020] Wray Is Wrong as FBI Director

That's naive take. Wary knows quite a bit about Antifa. Most probably the key people are iether FBI agents or informants. The problem is that he find Antifa activities politically useful. That's why he does not want to shut it down. This again put FBI in the role of kingmaker, like under Comey.
Also don't forget that Brennan faction of CIA is still in power and that means the "deep state" still is in control like was the case during Mueller investigation.
Sep 20, 2020 | townhall.com

In May of 2017, President Trump did the right thing and fired FBI Director James Comey, the individual at the center of the attempt to overturn the 2016 election results. Comey orchestrated the spying efforts on President Trump and his campaign, which included the FBI improperly applying for four separate Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrants to eavesdrop on campaign aide Carter Page. He also authorized a politically motivated investigation into Lt. General Michael Flynn and encouraged the entrapment of Flynn by his FBI agents in an infamous White House interview.

Clearly, Comey was a disastrous FBI Director; however, the President made a terrible choice when he replaced him with Christopher Wray, a bureaucrat who has not reformed the agency in any meaningful way. He also seems to be incapable of identifying the real threats that are facing the country.

In testimony on Thursday before the House Homeland Security Committee, Wray made a series of remarkable claims. He stated that Antifa is not a group but is more of "an ideology or maybe a movement." He also refused to identify Chinese efforts to interrupt the 2020 election and again focused attention on activities from Russia.

With these remarks, Wray is doing the bidding of the Democrats and following their talking points. Regarding Antifa violence, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY), claimed it was a "myth."

me title=

CARTOONS | MICHAEL RAMIREZ VIEW CARTOON

Nadler has been in his congressional cocoon for too long. Antifa has been active for several years, but since the death of George Floyd on May 25, it has intensified its activities around the country. Millions of Americans have seen the frequent and disturbing video footage of rioting and looting throughout the country. According to U.S. Congressman Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), "there have been more than 550 declared riots, many stoked by extremists, Antifa and the BLM (Black Lives Matter) organization."

In his comments to Wray at the committee meeting, Crenshaw also noted the rioters have done an extensive amount of damage. He stated that "between one and two billion dollars of insurance claims will be paid out. That doesn't come close to measuring the actual and true damage to people's lives, not even close."

Crenshaw is right as many of our urban areas, such as New York, Washington D.C., Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland among others have been devastated by a series of violent protests. In the past few months, scores of monuments have been destroyed, and significant damage has been done to businesses and public buildings. The group has also attacked innocent civilians and targeted police officers. As Crenshaw asserted in this rebuttal to Wray, Antifa matches the definition of a domestic terrorist organization.


[Sep 18, 2020] Middle East Peace and Trump's New Art of the Deal by Larry Johnson - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Notable quotes:
"... He thinks the Palestinians will accept permanent helot status? Maybe so... But is that something we should relish? ..."
"... And what of Syria? What of Syria? Evidently Trump considered murdering President Assad two years ago. Is he going to abandon regime change now? is he going to abandon the policy of Pompeo and Jeffries? ..."
"... My guess is that the acceptability for Helot status of Palestinians will depend on how much worse it is compared to the status of Palestinian equivalents elsewhere. Syria and Lebanon certainly look far less attractive. ..."
"... Also, from my admittedly limited experience, Palestinians aren't exactly homogenous, Gaza =! West Bank. ..."
"... If the Israelis are smart (and I think they are), they will continue to exploit Palestinian disunity by not having one helot status but several, with privileges to repress and boss around the lesser helots (perhaps even some less desirable Israelis) awarded to the higher helots. ..."
"... The neocons have been firmly ensconced in ME policy since Reagan. At least Trump made a little bit of lemonade. Nothing earth shattering IMO but moved the ball forward 10 yds and away from own goals under the so-called experts & strategists of the past decades. ..."
"... Support for Israel and its maximalist dreams has always been bipartisan. ..."
"... The colonel has a much more realistic take on this: the intention is to co-opt the Arab states into forcing the Palestinians to accept permanent helot status. Not quite slaves but closes to it. ..."
"... There would be many ways to describe that, but I suspect "peace plan" would rank amongst the less accurate ones. ..."
"... I also remember when the Trump admin killed the Gen. Suleimani late last year the same people also touted it a national security success. This is shameful pattern. ..."
"... Just because Jared Kushner, Berkowitz (Kushner's mini-me), David Friedman and the Zionist anti-American paid shills of Christians United For Israel et.al put Israel's interest first does not make it a success for American interests abroad. Trump does not know two things about the ME. He just obeys orders from this outside 'advisors' when it comes to ME policy. ..."
"... When I read that " If you look at relatively successful integration/assimilations in history, jointly overcoming something that was threatening to both typically ranked pretty highly as a cause." I think that The Islamic Republic of Iran is what is being offered or used as that cause. ..."
"... But if the present and future Israelis believe this means that the total advantage is totally theirs to press, then present and future Palestinians will continue searching for ways to make their unhappiness felt. But that outcome would not be Trump's fault. That outcome would be the majority-likudnic Israelis' choice. ..."
"... the problem with "outside in" strategy is that implies that if conditions are bad enough for the Palestinians, they will agree to any deal Trump can force down their throats. Instead, Palestinians have been offered terrible deals since 2000 (ie., a state that is never going to be a real state with permanent Israeli control over its borders, air space, and water tables ..."
"... The smarter plan is to acknowledge that the Zionists killed the Two-State Solution, and Palestinians might as well push this into an anti-Apartheid struggle. ..."
Sep 18, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

turcopolier , 16 September 2020 at 08:52 AM

All

It is clear that the heat has gone away in the fabled "Arab Street" over the issue of Israel. If that were not so, the rulers would not have dared to do this. That being so ... It will be very interesting to see how many people from these two countries go to Israel to visit holy sites like the al-Aqsa Mosque. There have not been many religious tourists from Egypt and Jordan. This is what the Israelis call pilgrims. Trump thinks that he can bring Saudi Arabia into such a deal? Good! Let's see it. He thinks that Iran can be brought into such a deal? Wonderful! Let's see it.

He thinks the Palestinians will accept permanent helot status? Maybe so... But is that something we should relish?

And what of Syria? What of Syria? Evidently Trump considered murdering President Assad two years ago. Is he going to abandon regime change now? is he going to abandon the policy of Pompeo and Jeffries?

I suggest that security should be very tight on airline flights from Bahrein and the UAE.

eakens , 16 September 2020 at 10:03 AM

I suspect this has less to do with peace and more to do with lining up a coalition against Iran. He's signing peace deals at the white house the same day he not only threatens Iran for a make believe assassination plot against our South African Ambassador, but admits he wanted to assassinate Assad.

He's making a big mistake though if he thinks Iranians will behave and respond similarly to the Arabs, and they are certainly not North Koreans.

He's being frog marched into a war with Iran while his ego is being stroked under the guise of a Nobel peace prize.

nbsp; tjfxh , 16 September 2020 at 11:17 AM

What say about Alastair Crooke's "Maintaining Pretence Over Reality: 'Simply Put, the Iranians Outfoxed the U.S. Defence Systems'" at Strategic Culture Foundation?

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/09/14/maintaining-pretence-over-reality-simply-put-iranians-outfoxed-us-defence-systems/

A.I.S. , 16 September 2020 at 11:49 AM

@ turcopolier:

Excellent questions.

My guess is that the acceptability for Helot status of Palestinians will depend on how much worse it is compared to the status of Palestinian equivalents elsewhere. Syria and Lebanon certainly look far less attractive. The other issue is the degree with which Arab elites can "reroute" Anti Israeli into Anti Iranian sentiments on the Arab street.

Also, from my admittedly limited experience, Palestinians aren't exactly homogenous, Gaza =! West Bank.

If the Israelis are smart (and I think they are), they will continue to exploit Palestinian disunity by not having one helot status but several, with privileges to repress and boss around the lesser helots (perhaps even some less desirable Israelis) awarded to the higher helots.

I think this will be fairly hard though. Various Historical, religion and cultural issues specific to the situation make it quite hard for Arabs to actually assimilate into Israeli society. There is also a lack of a unifying foe to unite against. If you look at relatively successful integration/assimilations in history, jointly overcoming something that was threatening to both typically ranked pretty highly as a cause.

Leith , 16 September 2020 at 12:01 PM

"I suggest that security should be very tight on airline flights from Bahrein and the UAE."

Bingo! I won't be flying on Gulf Air or FlyDubai.

Jack , 16 September 2020 at 02:12 PM

The neocons have been firmly ensconced in ME policy since Reagan. At least Trump made a little bit of lemonade. Nothing earth shattering IMO but moved the ball forward 10 yds and away from own goals under the so-called experts & strategists of the past decades.

The TDS afflicted media couldn't bear that some lemonade was made. Wolf Blitzer interviewing Jared Kushner was all about pandemic nothing about the implications or process to having couple gulf sheikhs recognize Israel. The fact is that these gulf sheikhs only paid lip service to the plight of the Palestinians in any case. This formalizes what was reality. The "Arab Street" have always been a manifestation of whatever were powerful manipulations. The manipulators have been coopted in the current lemonade making. In any case Bibi must be very pleased. He didn't have to give up anything in his difficult domestic political predicament.

Jack , 16 September 2020 at 02:44 PM

https://twitter.com/partynxs/status/1306015487273377792?s=21

Support for Israel and its maximalist dreams has always been bipartisan.

Serge , 16 September 2020 at 05:18 PM

The arabs simply do not care anymore, from Morocco to Oman. Their spirit totally broken by the "Arab spring", youth disillusioned and jobless. The only dream left for most is to ape the western lifestyle. The others are fighting in wars.

I can see one of two futures, a Clean Break: Securing the Realm-style one in which all of the arabs live life as helots under the thumb of a Greater Israel. This would bring relative economic prosperity to most of the helots.

Yeah, Right , 16 September 2020 at 06:03 PM

I think I see the flaw in this article: ..."If that turns out to be the case and this maneuver succeeds in ultimately bringing about a two state solution for Israel and the Palestinians,"...

Surely you don't believe that these maneuvers are intended to bring about a Palestinian state?

The colonel has a much more realistic take on this: the intention is to co-opt the Arab states into forcing the Palestinians to accept permanent helot status. Not quite slaves but closes to it.

There would be many ways to describe that, but I suspect "peace plan" would rank amongst the less accurate ones.

Polish Janitor , 16 September 2020 at 06:14 PM

One running theme that I have been seeing from the former so-called neocon critics and ME wars opponents (Michael Scheuer comes to mind) is their uncontrollable exhilaration for any terrible so-called F.P. 'success' that the Trump admin achieves in the ME.

I also remember when the Trump admin killed the Gen. Suleimani late last year the same people also touted it a national security success. This is shameful pattern.

Just because Jared Kushner, Berkowitz (Kushner's mini-me), David Friedman and the Zionist anti-American paid shills of Christians United For Israel et.al put Israel's interest first does not make it a success for American interests abroad. Trump does not know two things about the ME. He just obeys orders from this outside 'advisors' when it comes to ME policy.

It it exactly what it is. Israel normalized relations with the most notorious dictatorships and wants to implement Pegasus spying program and wide-scale surveillance (among other nefarious things) in UAE and Bahrain. How is that a success for America? America should stay out of these Israeli-first trouble making schemes and stay neutral or out of there.

Let me tell you what a F.P. success is, OK? It would have been a huge success if America was able to lure Iran into its orbit to fend of the Chinese communists out of the region and out of our lives and have a stronger alliance with regards to its upcoming Cold War with China.

It would have been successful for America to balance China out with Iran, India, Turkey and Afghanistan, and not let China to invest billions in Haifa port (close to U.S. military forces there) a major hub of its Belt and Road initiative and a huge blow to U.S. new Cold war effort against China.

Think about it.

Allow me to raise a few points: first of all , every single one of these brutal backward Arab dictatorships has had low key but crucial relations with Israel since the Cold War and they just made it open, Big deal! Second, this joyfulness for a hostile anti-american country is quite sad for two reasons:

1. that Larry touts it as a success for America, which is anything but a success for America. It is a success for Bibi and Trump's evangelical/zionist sugar daddies to cough up some Benjamins for Trump's campaign and his GOP/Likudniks. I guess nowadays our judgement is so clouded and inverted that MAGA and MIGA are considered inseparable.

2. The delusion that dems are bitterly angry and anti-Israel (because they are anti-Trump) and therefore it automatically becomes an issue of partisan support for Trump and whatever he does. This idea is so absurd that I won't get into it. Dems were the first to congratulate Israel.

I would like Larry to tell me what he thinks of H.R. 1697 Israel Anti-Boycot Act which punishes American citizens for practicing their god-given 2nd Amendment rights. or the 3.8 billion of aid, or the the gifting of Golan heights to Bibi? Are these big foreign policy success too?

What the Arab-Israeli normalization means:

*The U.S. wants out of the ME to focus on China, a wet dream that Israel favors especially post Cold War. It does not want secular, (semi) democratic sovereign states around it, and if anyone pays attention close enough they do whatever they can to prevent any kind of political reform and change of government to occur among Arab nations. Israelis are staunch supporters of Saudi, Bahraini, UAE, Jordanian, and Egyptian dictatorships in the MENA region.

Israel will now be better positioned to roll-back any kind of grassroots reform in the ME with the help of their now openly pro-Israeli Arab rulers by directing policies to these backward rulers to divest from human development and political reform and instead invest more in security, tech, surveillance.

This trend also explains Israeli constant opposition to the Iran Deal, which would have had further ramifications for political reform and accelerated weakening of Hardliners in Tehran and a better position for America to pivot to China with the help of a moderated Iran. Israel does not want a powerful democratic nation near its borders, and especially not in Iran. Just take a look at Israel's neighbors and tell me how many of them are democratic and friendly with Israel and how does Israel behave when there are secular Arab democratic states around it?

John Merryman , 16 September 2020 at 10:17 PM

In the end, it's all just tribal superstition. Logically a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The fact we are aware, than the myriad details of which we are aware.

One of the reasons we can't have a live and let live world is because everyone thinks their own vision should be universal, rather than unique. So the fundamentalists rule.

The reason nature is so diverse and dense is because it isn't a monoculture. Irrespective of our technology, we are still fairly primitive, in the grand scheme of things.

different clue , 17 September 2020 at 02:42 AM

A.I.S.,

When I read that " If you look at relatively successful integration/assimilations in history, jointly overcoming something that was threatening to both typically ranked pretty highly as a cause." I think that The Islamic Republic of Iran is what is being offered or used as that cause.

If this all ends up in the longest run leading to today's and tomorrow's Israelis accepting the lesser Israel that Rabin ended up deciding would be necessary for a lesser-but-still-real Palestine to emerge as a real country resigned with both resigned enough to that outcome that they would tolerate eachother's separate independence over the long term, then this will go somewhere good.

But if the present and future Israelis believe this means that the total advantage is totally theirs to press, then present and future Palestinians will continue searching for ways to make their unhappiness felt. But that outcome would not be Trump's fault. That outcome would be the majority-likudnic Israelis' choice.

Mathias Alexander , 17 September 2020 at 04:53 AM

To have a two state solution Israel will have to leave enough of Palestine without Jewish settlement for there to be room for another state. Their actions show that they have no intention of doing that.

Matthew , 17 September 2020 at 09:26 AM

Larry: the problem with "outside in" strategy is that implies that if conditions are bad enough for the Palestinians, they will agree to any deal Trump can force down their throats. Instead, Palestinians have been offered terrible deals since 2000 (ie., a state that is never going to be a real state with permanent Israeli control over its borders, air space, and water tables)

The smarter plan is to acknowledge that the Zionists killed the Two-State Solution, and Palestinians might as well push this into an anti-Apartheid struggle. The gerontocracy that rules the PA will soon pass away. The younger generation of Palestinians are much more sophisticated.

As a trial lawyer, I see this type of behavior all the time. If you offer someone essentially nothing, they lose nothing by rejecting it. The Arab dictators will not be around forever. And before Camp David, the Palestinians have suffered far worse than they are suffering now.

BABAK MAKKINEJAD , 17 September 2020 at 09:55 AM

Matthew:

For any kind of Peace in Palestine, Jerusalem must revert back to Muslim Sovereignty.

It is all about who calls the shots there; just as it was 800 years ago.

Artemesia , 17 September 2020 at 10:35 AM

Matthew: Your description of Trump's strategy is no different from Vladimir Jabotinsky's 1923 Iron Wall doctrine
http://www.marxists.de/middleast/ironwall/ironwall.htm
and
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-the-iron-wall-quot

In short: "We Jews know that Arabs (Palestinians) will never, ever voluntarily give up hope of resisting Jewish demands, and Jews will never stop with Jewish demands: that all of Palestine become Jewish.
Since 'voluntary' will not work, only force -- an Iron Wall -- will suffice.
Jabotinsky defines "Iron Wall" as the enforcement capacity of an outside power:

"we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question. Hence those who hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say "no" and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

Not only must this be so, it is so whether we admit it or not. What does the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate mean for us? It is the fact that a disinterested power committed itself to create such security conditions that the local population would be deterred from interfering with our efforts."

Be aware that Benjamin Netanyahu's father, Benzion, was Jabotinsky's administrative assistant, then replacement, in New York; that Bibi is very much heir to the ideological fervor of Jabotinsky & of Benzion; and that Benzion and Benjamin laid out the blueprint for the GWOT at the Jerusalem Conference July 4, 1979
https://www.amazon.com/International-Terrorism-Challenge-Benjamin-Netanyahu/dp/0878558942

Trump plays only a walk-on role in this carefully scripted 150 year old zionist drama.

turcopolier , 17 September 2020 at 10:58 AM

Babak

To "Muslim Sovereignty?" No. It should be an international city.

turcopolier , 17 September 2020 at 11:30 AM

james

"there isn't a lot of difference between KSA and these fiefdoms of uae and bahrain.." A total crock. you obviously have never been to either of these places.

BABAK MAKKINEJAD , 17 September 2020 at 11:46 AM

Col. Lang:

Who or what Legitimate Authority would administer such an International City?

None has ever existed.

Artemesia , 17 September 2020 at 12:00 PM

Jews can have Jerusalem if they return Washington, DC to full USA sovereignty.

[Sep 18, 2020] Exposing war crimes should always be legal. Committing and hiding them should not by Caitlin Johnstone

Sep 18, 2020 | www.rt.com

By Caitlin Johnstone , an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her website is here and you can follow her on Twitter @caitoz ...Amid all the pedantic squabbling over when it is and is not legal under US law for a journalist to expose evidence of US war crimes, we must never lose sight of the fact that (A) it should always be legal to expose war crimes, (B) it should always be illegal for governments to hide evidence of their war crimes, (C) war crimes should always be punished, (D) people who start criminal wars should always be punished, (E) governments should not be permitted to have a level of secrecy that allows them to start criminal wars, and (F) power and secrecy should always have an inverse relationship to one another.

The Assange case needs to be fought tooth and claw, but we must keep in mind that it is so very, very many clicks back from where we need to be as a civilization. In an ideal situation, governments should be too afraid of the public to keep secrets from them; instead, here we are begging the most powerful government in the world to please not imprison a journalist because he arguably did not break the rules that that government made for itself.

Do you see how far that point is from where we need to be?

It's important to remember this. It's important to remember that the amount of evil deeds power structures will commit is directly proportional to the amount of information they are permitted to hide from the public. We will not have a healthy world until power and secrecy have an inverse relationship to each other: privacy for rank-and-file individuals, and transparency for governments and their officials.

"But what about military secrets?" one might object. Yes, what about military secrets? What about the fact that virtually all military violence perpetrated by the world's largest power structures is initiated based on lies ? What about the utterly indisputable fact that the more secrecy we allow the war machine, the more wars it deceives the public into allowing it to initiate?

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1028347374765318144&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fop-ed%2F501031-caitlin-johnstone-exposing-war-crimes%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=219d021%3A1598982042171&width=550px

In a healthy world, the most powerful government on Earth wouldn't be trying to squint at its own laws in such a way that permits the prosecution of a journalist for telling the truth.

In a healthy world, the most powerful government on Earth wouldn't prosecute anyone for telling the truth at all.

In a healthy world, governments would prosecute their own war crimes, instead of those who expose them.

In a healthy world, governments wouldn't commit war crimes at all.

In a healthy world, governments wouldn't start wars at all.

In a healthy world, governments would see truth as something to be desired and actively sought, not something to be repressed and punished.

In a healthy world, governments wouldn't keep secrets from the public, and wouldn't have any cause to want to.

In a healthy world, if governments existed at all, they would exist solely as tools for the people to serve themselves, with full transparency and accountability to those people.

We are obviously a very, very far cry from the kind of healthy world we would all like to one day find ourselves in. But we should always keep in mind what a healthy world will look like, and hold it as our true north for the direction that we are pushing in.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

By Caitlin Johnstone , an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her website is here and you can follow her on Twitter @caitoz

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.


Reality007 3 hours ago 18 Sep, 2020 10:07 AM

Unfortunately, no criminals that have committed or covered up war crimes, decades ago to present, will ever be indicted. They are all above the law while all innocents that revealed the truths must pay highly. We can only pray and hope for the best for Julian Assange.
Fred Dozer Reality007 1 hour ago 18 Sep, 2020 12:16 PM
I see nothing wrong with robbing banks in criminal controlled countries. These governments, murder, cheat, lie, & steal.
T. Agee Kaye 2 hours ago 18 Sep, 2020 11:10 AM
The right of a people to know what their government is doing, and the potential consequences of those actions on the people, nation, and society, is inalienable. The exposure of war crimes and any corruption is not illegal and cannot be made illegal. The trial of Assange is not about the legality of Assange's actions. It is a display of the influence that criminal interests have over the government and judiciary. It is an attempt to create legitimacy by creating precedent. Murder has plenty of precedent. It will never be legitimate.
Jewel Gyn 3 hours ago 18 Sep, 2020 10:21 AM
Agreed but having said that, we are not living in a perfect world. Bully with big fists exist and the lesser countries just stood by frustrated and sucking their thumbs, silent lest they be targeted for voicing out. And you can see clearly why US is walking away from any form of organised voice eg UN.
Odinsson 2 hours ago 18 Sep, 2020 10:51 AM
What we need in the case of Julian Assange is factual reporting. While the motivation to prosecute Assange is most likely political, there would be no ability to prosecute him were it not for his active support of PFC Manning's hacking of a DOD information system. It is not unlawful to publish classified information which was provided to you, so long as you are not involved in the criminal acts leading to the exfiltration of the data. Had Assange not aided PFC Manning by looking up hash codes in spreadsheets of known password to hash code translations then the grand jury would not have indicted him. FWIW, it is my opinion that the statute of limitations expired long ago and this should be grounds for dismissal of all charges against him.
jholf 1 hour ago 18 Sep, 2020 12:04 PM
These world leaders, claim to be Christians, ... their God 'commands', "Thou shalt not kill." Yet, for more than 6 decades, that is exactly what each of these Christian Commanders in Chief, have done for no reason, other than to fill the pockets of the elite. A man is known by his deeds, Assange gave us truth, while these world leaders gave us war and destructi

[Sep 17, 2020] The Invisible Man at the Race Riots by E. Michael Jones

Who within the Deep state is supporting the riots? This is the question. Antifa would not last a a couple of months, if all repressive power of the state fall on the head of its brainwashed children of the middles class, who constitute the majority of it members. All members probably are well known to FBI and the organization was infiltrated long ago.
Notable quotes:
"... Lumpenproletariat ..."
"... Science and Society ..."
Sep 17, 2020 | www.unz.com

America went through its own bout of Dionysian intoxication in the days following May 25, when a Minneapolis cop by the name of Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of a 46-year-old Black man by the name of George Floyd, causing his death. Corrupted by 66 years of bad education, America's Black Lumpenproletariat erupted in an orgy of rioting that brought the rule of law to an end in many of America's large cities. As of this writing, Antifa, a group which Donald Trump has designated a domestic terrorist organization, is still in control of a six-square block section of downtown Seattle, which they have designated the "Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone." In Minneapolis, the town where the rioting started, their Pentheus, Mayor Jacob Frey, was denounced by one of the Bacchant women who spoke in the name of Black Lives Matter after he refused to defund the Minneapolis police department. Frey was not torn limb from limb, but he was expelled from the crowd and had to take refuge with the police he was ordered to defund.

The race riots of May and June 2020 were only the latest installment of what might be called the regime of governance by crisis which began four years ago, when the Deep State decided to do whatever was necessary to depose Donald Trump. That campaign began with Russiagate, followed by the impeachment, followed by the hate speech campaign of 2019 which sought to ban "unwanted content" from the Internet, followed by the Covid-19 pandemic. What united all of these crises was oligarch unhappiness with the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and a desire to replace the institutions of representative government with ad hoc committees of crisis managers masquerading as scientific experts and/or aggrieved minorities.

By now it should be obvious that the racial narrative writes itself whenever a Black man dies at the hands of a white cop. Floyd's body was still warm when the mainstream media took up the story which had already been written and declared him a saint, complete with halo and wings. In reality, Floyd was a violent felon who died with traces of fentanyl and cocaine in his system, but the BBC described him as someone who "was simply trying to live life as any other American, in search of betterment in the face of both personal and societal challenges." [1] He then became "the latest totem of the ills that plague the country in 2020." After growing in wisdom, age, and grace, Floyd's life suddenly "took a different turn, with a string of arrests for theft and drug possession culminating in an armed robbery charge in 2007, for which he was sentenced to five years in prison." Missing from the BBC account was any mention of Floyd's incarceration, drug dealing, violence against pregnant women or his role as a porn star, [2] but no one needed to tell a graduate of America's public school system that he was witnessing the latest installment of the ongoing saga of American racism in action.

... ... ...

Both sides of the racial conflict which George Floyd's death ignited were controlled by Jews. The ADL has consistently played a double game by condemning the racial violence that their training seminars have created. According to the Democratic Socialists of America, "The police violence happening tonight in Minneapolis is straight out of the IDF playbook," adding, "US cops train in Israel." [20] After the death of George Floyd, the ADL, eager to avoid any association with the violence their police seminars wrought among Blacks, tweeted: "As we continue to fight for justice for #GeorgeFloyd, we also need to fight for justice for #BreonnaTaylor, who was murdered in her own home by police. We need justice for everyone who has been a victim of racist policing & violence." [21]

At the same time that the ADL was demanding justice for George Floyd, they made no mention of the death of Iyad Hallaq, an autistic Palestinian man who was gunned down after pleading for his life while on the way to his special education class in occupied East Jerusalem. [22] The Electronic Intifada, which did mention Hallaq's death, then singled out the Anti-Defamation league as "a major player in the industry of bringing US police junkets to Israel for 'counterterrorism' and other kinds of joint training." [23]

Docile Negroes at traditionally Jewish organizations like the NAACP routinely get praised for their work against racism, but as soon as Black Lives Matter began its Black solidarity with Palestine campaign, the Israeli government and its lobbies in America attempted to disrupt the Black Lives Matter movement in retaliation. In 2018 Al Jazeera's documentary The Lobby -- USA revealed how The Israel Project "pulled strings behind the scenes to get a Black Lives Matter fundraiser at a New York City nightclub canceled." [24]

So on the one hand we have American policemen being trained to treat their fellow citizens in the same way that Israelis treat Palestinians, including the knee holds that will subdue and sometimes kill them. This explains the white cop side of the equation. But on the other hand, we have George Soros funding Black Lives Matter and the insurrections which follow incidents of police brutality as the black side of the equation. Taken together both Jewish-funded groups perpetuate the cycle of increasing violent racial conflict in America, while remaining all the while invisible.

Black Lives Matter was a reincarnation of the Black-Jewish Alliance, which began with the founding of the ADL after the lynching of Leo Frank and has continued to this day, with time-outs taken for the World Wars of the 20th century. Shortly after World War II, Louis Wirth, a Jewish sociologist from the University of Chicago began implementing his plan to "integrate" housing in Chicago. When Chicago's ethnic neighborhoods understood that "integration" was a euphemism for ethnic cleansing, riots ensued, beginning with the Airport Park riots of 1947 and culminating in the arrival of Martin Luther King in Marquette Park almost 20 years later. As one more indication that Black Lives Matter was the reincarnation of the Black-Jewish Alliance, Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, was born in 1981 to a white Jewish father and a Black mother.

Black Lives Matter was funded by George Soros to promote race war in the United States, but BLM also promoted sexual deviance, another cause dear to the heart of the world's most prominent Hungarian Jewish philanthropist. In their recently published manifesto, BLM situates its attempt to be "unapologetically Black in our positioning" within a matrix of sexual deviance, including attempts "to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk," by disrupting "the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure" and putting in its place a "queer-affirming network." [25]

If that jargon sounds familiar, it's because it stems from the university gender studies programs which provide the matrix from which groups like BLM and Antifa get both their ideas and their recruits. The ultimate cause of the uprising which took place in city after city in the wake of George Floyd's death was bad education. Beginning in the late 1980s, literature departments had been taken over by "tenured radicals" who have used critical theory, derived from thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, and Gramsci, to undermine the validity of all structures of authority. This essentially Nietzschean transvaluation of all values transferred moral superiority to anyone who could claim oppression according to oligarchic endorsed categories like race and gender, allowing the tenured radicals to take over one department after another and, more importantly, allowing the proliferation of new departments, invariably ending in "studies," as in gender studies, which drove the traditional liberal arts from academe turning traditional universities into Maoist inspired re-education camps. The takeover of academe reached its bitter culmination when Antifa led groups of disaffected, badly educated young people, who were aware of nothing more significant than their grievances, into the streets in what became an uncanny replication of the Chinese cultural revolution of 1966. One of the most unlikely leaders of that revolution in China was an American Jew from Charleston, South Carolina by the name of Sidney Rittenberg.

The academic pedigree of Rittenberg's successors became apparent when Antifa warlord Joseph Alcoff got apprehended in Philadelphia in 2017 for assaulting a group of Hispanic Marines. Alcoff's arrest shed light on one of the main figures in a society that remained literally faceless because of their habit of wearing masks at the protests they disrupted by their violence. Alcoff, who was known as the leader of Antifa in Washington, DC, was the child of radical academics and had co-authored an academic paper with his mother Linda Alcoff in Volume 79 of Science and Society in the special issue on "Red and Black: Marxist Encounters with Anarchism," entitled "Autonomism in Theory and Practice." [26] Radical theory in the mind of Linda Alcoff led to violent praxis in the life of her son. As with Black Lives Matter, the ADL has played a double game with Antifa, condemning its tactics while at the same time defending it against accusations that it was morally equivalent to the "white supremacists" it attacked in the streets of Charlottesville in 2017.

Continuity between the generations was made possible by the Jewish revolutionary spirit. The fact that Alcoff was a Jew got suppressed in virtually every mainstream account of his activity, [27] which sanitized his communist connections by linking him to the Democratic Party through figures like Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters. Alcoff was more forthright when he spoke in his own voice, saying on one Youtube video, "I'm a Communist, motherf***er," before spitting into the camera. [28] Christians for truth portrayed Alcoff as "a self-styled modern-day Leon Trotsky" and attributed the suppression of his ethnic identity to the fact that "Antifa's political manifestations are funded by the billionaire Jew, George Soros." [29]

Andy Ngo, who was severely beaten by Antifa thugs in Portland in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, claims that "prominent media figures and politicians glamorize and even promote Antifa as a movement for a just cause. CNN's Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon have defended Antifa on-air. Chuck Todd invited Antifa ideologue Mark Bray onto Meet the Press to explain why Antifa's political violence is "ethical." [30] Ngo goes on to mention Joseph Alcoff as one of the most visible figures in what is otherwise a clandestine organization, and claims that he had access to Democrat Representative Maxine Waters in 2016. [31] He also mentions Adam Rothstein, who is associated with the Rose City Antifa group which assaulted him in 2016. Rothstein conducted a series of "secret lectures" at a Portland bookstore where local recruits learned how to "heckle" opponents and make them "look ridiculous, make them feel outnumbered," and convinced that the "Trump thing is gonna go by the wayside." [32]

Armed with political clout of this magnitude, Antifa can easily overwhelm local police forces, which is what happened in Portland in 2016. The result is that "city government and police lack the political will to protect citizens." What happened in Seattle in 2020 with the creation of the "Capital Hill Autonomous Zone" was only the logical conclusion to what began in Portland in 2016 and spread all over the Pacific Northwest, "where Antifa is especially active." In its attempt to destabilize and destroy the nation state and its sovereign borders, Antifa drew support from "mainstream progressive politicians, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who normalize hatred of border enforcement and sovereignty as such." [33]

Antifa has continued to be successful in disrupting local government and thwarting police attempts to bring them under control because it is a Jewish organization which can always count on favorable press from the Jewish-controlled mainstream media, which renders the connection invisible. The same cannot be said for the Jewish press, which cites Antifa's Jewishness with thinly-disguised ethnic pride.

When Donald Trump referred to Antifa as a terrorist organization, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz came to their defense, "Trump's Attacks on Antifa Are Attacks on Jews." [34] According to an article which appeared in the Forward , Antifa activism "is an affirmation of Jewish identity, both religious and secular" [35] which stretches all the way back to 1897 with the founding of Bundism, which "sought to organize the working-class Jews of Russia, Poland, and Lithuania." [36] After members of a specifically Jewish Antifa group defaced a plaque in New York City honoring the president of Vichy France Philippe Petain, they left a note which defended the rationale behind their act of vandalism:

With Monday's actions, Jewish antifascists and allied forces have served notice that fascist apologism will not be tolerated in our city in 2019; that anti-Semitic ideology and violence will be confronted with Jewish solidarity and strength; and that the Holocaust will be remembered not only with sadness and grief but also with righteous anger and action: 'We will never forget. We will never forgive.' [37]

In the final analysis, Antifa is a Jewish organization in the same way that Bolshevism and Neoconservatism were Jewish political movements. Not every member of Antifa is a Jew, but Jews invariably find their ways into leadership roles in places like Portland, Washington, DC, and even in China, as was the case during the Cultural Revolution of 1966, because they have an advantage over non-Jews in embodying the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit which is the hidden grammar of all revolutionary movements.

[ ]

This is just an excerpt of the full article available in the September 2020 issue of Culture Wars magazine. Please purchase the digital download of the magazine below to read the full article .


T. Weed , says: September 15, 2020 at 2:39 am GMT

I just read it in Culture Wars magazine. Thank you, Mr. Jones, very informative, one of your best.

Joe Levantine , says: September 15, 2020 at 1:52 pm GMT

Great meticulous research but Dr. Jones. I wonder which of his books traces the history of the forever revolutionaries two and half millennia back.

MrTea , says: September 16, 2020 at 9:15 pm GMT

Interesting article, not the least surprising the Usual Suspects are playing both sides. Like WW2?

One picky point is the Yanez shooting, the victim did have a gun, he had a permit for it. He didn't show his hands and died with his hand near the gun. This was the one his GF put out on Facebook Live to it incited two police massacres right away, the one everybody knows about in Dallas (where they killed the shooter with a robot bomb) an another in Louisiana.

I'm a witness the SF Bay Area as a model of the racial obsession/gender bending schemes. What a mess the place is–the signature of the Left-wing establishment that runs the place is how the education system fails to fulfill the simple market demands for labor in their own locale, at the high end Silicon Valley runs on Indian/Pakistani B-1s and at the other the booming (until now) construction business runs on mostly imported Hispanics.

They spend more per pupil than the rest of the world and the whole system runs on immigration.

Carlton Meyer , says: Website September 17, 2020 at 4:22 am GMT

I couldn't finish this article after reading this garbage:

"Floyd was a violent felon who died with traces of fentanyl and cocaine in his system"

It was announced two weeks ago that he had a lethal dose. His toxicology report was finally made public and shows that he had a lethal dose of the dangerous pain killer fentanyl in his system. This caused his lungs to fill with fluid, which explains why he told arriving cops "I Can't Breath" and did not cooperate as he was delusional and dying. The cops wrestled him to the ground and cuffed him as he died from a fentanyl overdose. Floyd would have died right there even if the cops had not shown up.

This is why coroners wait for toxicology results before declaring the cause of death, but in this case he bowed to political pressure and announced his death was caused by the knee to the neck. This news is so big that our corporate media, which has promoted the riots, refuses to air the truth. Details can be read here. https://spectator.org/minnesota-v-derek-chauvin-et-al-the-prosecutions-dirty-little-secret/

In fair and normal world, the accused cops would be immediately freed and rehired with a bad mark for Chauvin using an improper neck hold. Let's see what happens, but I don't expect justice.

Colin Wright , says: Website September 17, 2020 at 4:32 am GMT

' a Minneapolis cop by the name of Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of a 46-year-old Black man by the name of George Floyd, causing his death '

Is that a fact?

Hang All Text Drivers , says: September 17, 2020 at 5:22 am GMT

Floyd said "i can't breathe" several times BEFORE he was put on the ground. The cops did nothing wrong and were trying to help him. It's all another monstrous media lie like the mueller report and jussie smollett and rayshard brooks and the covington kids and bubba wallace and the KY gun range video.

Tsar Nicholas , says: September 17, 2020 at 8:40 am GMT

Hey, Dr Jones, don't you realise that favourably referencing Jewish Voice for Peace is anti-semitic?

Malla , says: September 17, 2020 at 9:16 am GMT

The American Deep State can destroy anti-fa if it wanted. Hunting down all the leaders of this terrorist organization is not that hard. But of course the American Deep State will not do so because anti-fa is a branch of the deep state, just like how Hollywood and the media are (& have been for a long time) arms of the American (Globalist) deep state.

Jake , says: September 17, 2020 at 11:11 am GMT

This is one of Jones' many indispensable articles. The opening alone is required reading of anyone slightly bothered by what is going on. Dionysius sparks sexual revolution, and it leads to debauched riot and murder and then to either social collapse or else brutal tyranny.

The American Left and the Neocons both demand tyranny, as brutal as possible. They serve anti-Christ.

It is either Christ and Christendom or the chaos of anti-Christ.

If Jones would realize that the Novus Ordo Mass and Vatican II are at best impotent before Dionysius and return to Tradition, he could serve much better.

Jake , says: September 17, 2020 at 11:52 am GMT

It cannot be repeated too much: we live in the Anglo-Zionist Empire 2.0. The first phase of Anglo-Zionist Empire was the British Empire. The Brit WASP Empire spread philoSemitism across the globe: cultural Zionism that was the inherent fruit of Anglo-Saxon Puritanism, which was a Judaizing heresy that was the final and most defining part of Modern English, and Anglophone Protestant, culture.

The reality is that we are in the eyes of the Anglo-Zionist Empire's elites what Irish Catholic were to archetypal WASP Oliver Cromwell and what Palestinians are to Israelis. They wish us exterminated or made serfs forever, and the base reason predates Freud, Darwin, Marx and the French Revolution. It is Judaizing heresy birthing monsters to war against historic Christianity and peoples who have any legacy in the building and maintenance of Christendom and therefore do not serve Zionism.

WASP culture serves Zionism and always will.

When Kevin McDonald realizes all of that and the necessary inferences, his work will become worth the effort.

TGD , says: September 17, 2020 at 3:28 pm GMT

There's a sure way to curb the influence that certain (((individuals))) have on American culture and politics; it's called the "wealth tax." It's a tax on the assets of the rich and also on foundations set up to circumvent the inheritance tax. Both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren proposed a wealth tax but it is not included in Biden's platform. Instead, he's proposed raising the maximum income tax rate to 39.6%. There are lots of loopholes that individuals can utilize to reduce their income tax obligations. It won't stop their meddling in social and political affairs. Only a very stiff wealth tax (at least 10% per year) will curb their meddling.

[Sep 17, 2020] Another illustration of the economy of scale effect

Sep 17, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

William Gruff , Sep 15 2020 18:50 utc | 42

While I agree with the statement, I can, with a degree of certainty, say nothing was intercepted, and this is all face saving. As this article elucidates, no such iron dome, exists, or cannot be overcome.
All empire's bases remain exposed in the region. This is why the empire is high tailing it out of SW Asia. Zarif said so, himself.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/09/14/maintaining-pretence-over-reality-simply-put-iranians-outfoxed-us-defence-systems/

Dr Rubin, the founder and first director of the Israel Missile Defence Organization, which developed the state's first national missile defence shield, wrote in the wake of the 14 September attack on Abqaiq, (the Saudi Armco oil facility) that it was: "A brilliant feat of arms. It was precise, carefully-calibrated, devastating yet bloodless -- a model of a surgical operation the incoming threats [were not] detected by the U.S. air control systems deployed in the area, nor by U.S. satellites

This had nothing to do with flaws in the air and missile defence systems; but with the fact that they were not designed to deal with ground-hugging threats. Simply put, the Iranians outfoxed the defense systems".

William Gruff , Sep 15 2020 19:50 utc | 47
William Gruff , Sep 15 2020 18:50 utc | 42
Katyusha rockets are normally fired in salvos of dozens. Two of them being launched against the American fortress in Baghdad is just gentle prodding.

Another interesting point is that Katyusha rockets (BM-21 Grad) are dirt cheap. Whatever was used to intercept them was several orders of magnitude more expensive. I'm sure the Iraqi militias can keep lobbing Katyushas at the Green Zone for much longer than America can afford to try to shoot them down.

Sakineh Bagoom , Sep 15 2020 19:08 utc | 44
Another interesting point is that Katyusha rockets (BM-21 Grad) are dirt cheap. Whatever was used to intercept them was several orders of magnitude more expensive. I'm sure the Iraqi militias can keep lobbing Katyushas at the Green Zone for much longer than America can afford to try to shoot them down.

[Sep 17, 2020] Antifa Is A Real Thing-- FBI Director Wray Rebuts Democratic Claims That Antifa Is A Myth

Sep 17, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

...As I have written, Antifa is more of a movement than a specific organization. However, it has long been the "Keyser Söze" of the anti-free speech movement , a loosely aligned group that employs measures to avoid easy detection or association.

Wray stated "And we have quite a number - and I've said this quite consistently since my first time appearing before this committee - we have any number of properly predicated investigations into what we would describe as violent anarchist extremists and some of those individuals self-identify with Antifa. "

Wray was adamant: "Antifa is a real thing. It's not a fiction" and, while it is not a conventional organization as opposed to a movement, they have arrested people who admit that they are Antifa.

... ... ..

George Washington University student Jason Charter has been charged as the alleged "ringleader" of efforts to take down statues across the capital. Charter has been an active Antifa member on campus for years.

[Sep 17, 2020] Marxist Antifa means Solidatity with Isreal! – Niki´s Opinion Forum

Sep 17, 2020 | orwell1984366490226.wordpress.com

The State Department can designate foreign organizations as terrorist organizations, but there is no law governing domestic organizations. At the moment, it is unclear what President Trump's tweet refers to in concrete legal steps. The Patriot Act defines domestic terrorism, but there are no federal crimes tied to domestic terror.

Trump said in July of 2019 that he was considering declaring Antifa an "Organization of Terror."

Another challenge is the nature of Antifa, which is less of an organization, with structure and leaders, than a decentralized movement. Antifa is a global movement largely made up of anarchists, socialists, and other left-wing groups that oppose right-wing authoritarianism and white supremacy, sometimes violently . Unlike other radical groups, there is no controlling organizational structure, choosing instead to operate semi-autonomously and without leaders.

Antifa is known for its black-bloc protest tactics, where protestors wear all black and cover up their face so that they can't be identified by police or right-wing opponents.

Antifa's name comes from the pre-World War 2 German group Antifaschistische Aktion, which resisted the Nazi German state, and birthed the design of Antifa's now infamous flag.

Antifa gained much more public attention under the Trump presidency, as the movement disrupted events with far-right speakers across the country, such as Vice and Proud Boy founder Gavin McInnis's speech at the Metroplitan Republican Club . Most notably, the organization faced off against the white nationalist Unite the Right rally.

Noted black clergyman and left-wing activist Cornel West told Democracy Now that Antifa protected him and other clergy from the worst of the white nationalist violence.

"We would have been crushed like cockroaches were it not for the anarchists and the anti-fascists," he told Democracy Now. "You had police holding back and just allowing fellow citizens to go at each other."

Trump, in his response to the Charlottesville protest, said that he blamed Antifa and the "alt-left" for violence as well.

"What about the alt-left who came charging at the alt-right?" Trump said at a press conference .

Attorney General William Barr also blamed "anarchist and far-left extremist" groups for the violence on Saturday. On Sunday, the Attorney General's office released guidance that said that the his office is working with the 56 regional FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces to "identify criminal organizers and instigators." Zeke Miller✔ @ZekeJMiller

AG Barr: "To identify criminal organizers and instigators, and to coordinate federal resources with our state and local partners, federal law enforcement is using our existing network of 56 regional FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF). "

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409 7:28 PM – May 31, 2020 Twitter Ads info and privacy 214 people are talking about this

It is unclear what other avenues the federal government may use to pursue enforcement actions against Antifa, but the FBI Agents Association has been lobbying for the creation of a domestic terrorism law.

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[Sep 17, 2020] FBI director rehashes 2016 claims but provides no evidence

Notable quotes:
"... The CIA was founded by the same fascists who tried to enlist Smedley Butler to overthrow FDR. During the post-war period, they smuggled their ideological brethren out of Germany with operation Paperclip. Their founding fathers included Prescott Bush, a Nazi, whose son and grandson went on to become US Presidents. ..."
Sep 17, 2020 | www.rt.com

apothqowejh 4 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 04:31 PM

The CIA was founded by the same fascists who tried to enlist Smedley Butler to overthrow FDR. During the post-war period, they smuggled their ideological brethren out of Germany with operation Paperclip. Their founding fathers included Prescott Bush, a Nazi, whose son and grandson went on to become US Presidents.

They have never stopped hating Russia, nor have they ever stopped lying to the American Public.

[Sep 16, 2020] The Interface between Propaganda and War

Sep 16, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

snake , Sep 15 2020 22:09 utc | 54

Karlof 1 @ 32 attacks vk @4-- Your attempt to credit Karl Popper with the concept of public opinion is just as false as the stories b wrote about. Click here for a history of that concept. by: karlof1 | Sep 15 2020 17:04 utc | 32


What I like about what vk@ 4 said is that he has given this list a beginning to not only understand our plight as members of the governed classes, but also to analyze our experience with this stuff and to develop a set of rules that can allow us to defend our minds against being controlled by invisible hands of mind control.

can we on this list develop a defensive strategy and use it to teach the governed masses?

Around the globe and throughout history it can be observed that the oligarchs invent a collection of values and stuff them into structures they call nation states, culture, institutions and journalist are all designed to, and rewarded for supporting the values, while media is charged to keep the propaganda circulating.

The H&C propaganda model pulls together from across the political communications literature the variety of factors which essentially constrain journalist and means that they don't actually play the independent autonomous and watchdog role that we expect them to in a democracy ae Herman Chromsky talk about the importance oe size concentration ownership oe mainstream media the way in w/e ownership of most oe media outlets w/people go to for their information is essentially associated w/very large conglomerates w/h overlapping interests and overlapping interests with government and this produces a large structural constraint oe way the media operates.

The Interface between Propaganda and War: Prof.
The Propaganda Model: The filters (Herman & Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, the political economy of the mass media).

[Sep 14, 2020] The Plot Against Libya- An Obama-Biden-Clinton Criminal Conspiracy -

Sep 14, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

The Plot Against Libya: An Obama-Biden-Clinton Criminal Conspiracy


by Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2020 - 23:40 Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print

Authored by Eric Draitser via Counterpunch.org,

The scorching desert sun streams through narrow slats in the tiny window. A mouse scurries across the cracked concrete floor, the scuttling of its tiny feet drowned out by the sound of distant voices speaking in Arabic. Their chatter is in a western Libyan dialect distinctive from the eastern dialect favored in Benghazi. Somewhere off in the distance, beyond the shimmering desert horizon, is Tripoli, the jewel of Africa now reduced to perpetual war.

But here, in this cell in a dank old warehouse in Bani Walid, there are no smugglers, no rapists, no thieves or murderers. There are simply Africans captured by traffickers as they made their way from Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Eritrea, or other disparate parts of the continent seeking a life free of war and poverty, the rotten fruit of Anglo-American and European colonialism. The cattle brands on their faces tell a story more tragic than anything produced by Hollywood.

These are slaves: human beings bought and sold for their labor. Some are bound for construction sites while others for the fields. All face the certainty of forced servitude, a waking nightmare that has become their daily reality.

This is Libya, the real Libya. The Libya that has been constructed from the ashes of the US-NATO war that deposed Muammar Gaddafi and the government of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. The Libya now fractured into warring factions, each backed by a variety of international actors whose interest in the country is anything but humanitarian.

But this Libya was built not by Donald Trump and his gang of degenerate fascist ghouls. No, it was the great humanitarian Barack Obama, along with Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Susan Rice, Samantha Power and their harmonious peace circle of liberal interventionists who wrought this devastation. With bright-eyed speeches about freedom and self-determination, the First Black President, along with his NATO comrades in France and Britain, unleashed the dogs of war on an African nation seen by much of the world as a paragon of economic and social development.

But this is no mere journalistic exercise to document just one of the innumerable crimes carried out in the name of the American people. No, this is us, the antiwar left in the United States, peering through the cracks in the imperial artifice – crumbling as it is from internal rot and political decay – to shine a light through the gloom named Trump and directly into the heart of darkness.

There are truths that must be made plain lest they be buried like so many bodies in the desert sand.

The War on Libya: A Criminal Conspiracy

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To understand the depth of criminality involved in the US-NATO war on Libya, we must unravel a complex story involving actors from both the US and Europe who quite literally conspired to bring about this war, while simultaneously exposing the unconstitutional, imperial presidency as embodied by Mr. Hope and Change himself.

In doing so, a picture emerges that is strikingly at odds with the dominant narrative about good intentions and bad dictators. For although Gaddafi was presented as the villain par excellence in this story told by the Empire's scribes in corporate media, it is in fact Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, former French President Nicholas Sarkozy, French philosopher-cum-neocolonial adventurist Bernard Henri-Levy, and former UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who are the real malevolent forces. It was they, not Gaddafi, who waged a blatantly illegal war on false pretenses and for their own aggrandizement. It was they, not Gaddafi, who conspired to plunge Libya into chaos and civil war from which it is yet to emerge. It was they who beat the war drums while proclaiming peace on earth and good will to men.

The US-NATO war on Libya represents perhaps one of the most egregious examples of US military aggression and lawlessness in recent memory. Of course, the US didn't act alone as a wide cast of characters played a role as the French and British were keen to involve themselves in the reassertion of control over a once lucrative African asset torn from European control by the evil Gaddafi. And this, only a few years after former UK Prime Minister and Iraq war criminal Tony Blair met with Gaddafi to usher in a new era of openness and partnership.

The story begins with Bernard Henri-Lévy, the French philosopher, journalist, and amateur foreign service officer who fancied himself an international spy. Having failed to arrive in Egypt in time to buttress his ego by capitalizing on the uprising against former dictator Hosni Mubarak, he quickly shifted his attention to Libya, where an uprising in the anti-Gaddafi hotbed of Benghazi was underway. As Le Figaro chronicled , Henri-Levy managed to talk his way into a meeting with then head of the National Transition Council (TNC) Mustapha Abdeljalil, a former Gaddafi official who became head of the anti-Gaddafi TNC. But Henri-Levy wasn't there just for an interview to be published in his French paper, he was there to help overthrow Gaddafi and, in so doing, make himself into an international star.

Henri-Levy quickly pressed his contacts and got on the phone with French President Nicholas Sarkozy to ask him, rather bluntly, if he'd agree to meet with Abdeljalil and the leadership of the TNC. Just a few days later, Henri-Levy and his colleagues arrived at the Élysée Palace with TNC leadership at their side. To the utter shock of the Libyans present, Sarkozy tells them that he plans to recognize the TNC as the legitimate government of Libya. Henri-Levy and Sarkozy have now, at least in theory, deposed the Gaddafi government.

But the little problem of Gaddafi's military victories and the very real possibility that he might emerge victorious from the conflict complicated matters as the French public had become aware of the scheme and was rightly lambasting Sarkozy. Henri-Levy, ever the opportunist, stoked the patriotic fervor by announcing that without French intervention, the tricolor flag flying over five-star hotels in Benghazi would be stained with blood. The PR campaign worked as Sarkozy quickly came around to the idea of military intervention.

However, Henri-Levy had a still more critical role to play: bringing the US military juggernaut into the plot. Henri-Levy organized the first of what would be several high-level talks between US officials from the Obama Administration and the Libyans of the TNC. Most importantly, Henri-Levy set up the meeting between Abdeljalil and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. While Clinton was skeptical at the time of the meeting, it would be a matter of months before she and Joe Biden, along with the likes of Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and others would be planning the political, diplomatic, and military route to regime change in Libya.

The Americans Enter the Fray

There would have been no war in Libya were it not for the US political, diplomatic, and military machine. In this sense, despite the relatively meager US military involvement, the war in Libya was an American war. That is to say, it was a war that could not have happened were it not for the active collaboration of the Obama Administration with its French and British counterparts.

As Jo Becker of the NY Times explained in 2016, Hillary Clinton met with Mahmoud Jibril, a prominent Libyan politician who would go on to become the new Prime Minister of post-Gaddafi Libya, and his associates, in order to assess the faction now garnering US support . Clinton's job, according to Becker, was "to take measure of the rebels we supported" – a fancy way of saying that Clinton attended the meeting to determine whether this group of politicians speaking on behalf of a diverse group of anti-Gaddafi voices (ranging from pro-democracy activists to outright terrorists affiliated with global terror networks) should be supported with US money and covert arms.

The answer, ultimately, was a resounding yes.

But of course, as with all America's warmongering misadventures, there was no consensus on military intervention. As Becker reported, some in the Obama Administration were skeptical of the easy victory and post-conflict political calculus. One prominent voice of dissent, at least according to Becker, was former Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Himself no dove, Gates was concerned that Clinton and Biden's hawkish attitude toward Libya would ultimately lead to an Iraq-style political nightmare that would undoubtedly end with the US having created and then abandoned a failed state – exactly what happened.

It is important to note that Clinton and Biden were two of the principal voices for aggression and war. Both were supportive of the No-Fly Zone from early on, and both advocated for military intervention. Indeed, the two have been simpatico in nearly every war crime committed by the US in the last 30 years, including perhaps most egregiously in support of Bush's crime against humanity that we call the second Iraq War.

As former Clinton lackey (Deputy Director of Secretary of State Clinton's Policy Planning staff) Derek Chollet explained, "[Libya] seemed like an easy case." Chollet, a principal participant in the American conspiracy to make war on Libya who later went on to serve directly under Obama and at the National Security Council, inadvertently illustrates in stark relief the imperial arrogance of the Obama-Clinton-Biden liberal interventionist camp. In calling Libya an "easy case" he of course means that Libya was a perfect candidate for a regime change operation whose primary benefit would be to boost politically those who supported it.

Chollet, like many strategic planners at the time, saw Libya as a slam dunk opportunity to turn the demonstrations and uprisings of 2010-2011, which quickly became known as the Arab Spring, into political capital from the Democratic camp of the US ruling class. This rapidly became Clinton's position. And soon, the consensus of the entire Obama Administration.

Obama's War Off the Books

One of the more pernicious myths of the US war on Libya was the notion – propagated dutifully by the defense lobbyists-cum-journalists at major corporate media outlets – that the war was a cheap little war that cost the US almost nothing. There were no American lives lost in the war itself (Benghazi is another mythology to be unraveled later), and very little cost in terms of "treasure", to use that despicable imperialist phrase.

But while the total cost of the war paled in comparison to the monumental-scale crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the means by which it was funded has cost the US far more than dollars; the war on Libya was a criminal and unconstitutional endeavor that has further laid the groundwork for the imperial presidency and unconstrained executive power. As the Washington Post reported at the time:

Noting that Obama had said the mission could be paid for with money already appropriated to the Pentagon, [former House Speaker] Boehner pressed the president on whether supplemental funding would be requested from Congress.

Unforeseen military operations that require expenditures such as those being made for the Libyan effort normally require supplemental appropriations since they are outside the core Pentagon budget. That is why funds for Afghanistan and Iraq are separate from the regular Defense Department budget. The added costs for some of the operations in Libya are minimal But the expenditures for weapons, fuel and lost equipment are something else.

Because the Obama Administration did not seek congressional appropriations to fund the war, there is very little in the way of paper trail to do a proper accounting of the costs of the war. As the cost of each bomb, fighter jet, and logistical support vehicle disappeared into the abyss of Pentagon accounting oblivion, so too did any semblance of constitutional legality. In essence, Obama helped establish a lawless presidency that not only has little respect for constitutionally mandated checks and balances, but completely ignores the rule of law. Indeed, some of the crimes that Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr are guilty of have their direct corollary in the Obama Administration's prosecution of the Libya war.

So where did the money come from and where did it go? It's anybody's guess really, unless you're one of those rubes who likes taking the Pentagon's word for it. As a Pentagon spokesperson told CNN in 2011, "The price tag for U.S. Defense Department operations in Libya as of September 30 [was] $1.1 billion. This included daily military operations, munitions, the drawdown of supplies and humanitarian assistance." However, to illustrate the downright Orwellian impossibility of discerning the truth, Vice President Joe Biden doubled that number when speaking on CNN, suggesting that "NATO alliance worked like it was designed to do, burden-sharing. In total, it cost us $2 billion, no American lives lost."

As is painfully evident, there is no clear way to know how much was spent other than to take the word of those who prosecuted the war. With no congressional oversight, and no clear documentary record, the war on Libya disappears down the memory hole, and with it the idea that there is a separation of powers, Congressional authority to make war, or a functioning Constitution.

America's Dirty War in Libya

While the enduring memory of Libya for most Americans is the political theater that resulted from the attack on the US facility in Benghazi that killed several Americans, including US Ambassador Stevens, it is not nearly the most consequential. Rather, America's use of terrorist groups (and the insurgents who emerged from them) as military proxies may perhaps be the real legacy from a strategic perspective. For while the corporate media presented the narrative of spontaneous protests and uprisings to overthrow Gaddafi, it was in fact a loose network of terror groups that did the dirty work.

While much of this recent history has been buried by bad reporting, establishment mythmaking, and conspiracist muddying of the truth, it was surprisingly well reported at the time. For example, as the New York Times wrote of one of the primary US-backed forces on the ground during the war in 2011:

"The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group was formed in 1995 with the goal of ousting Colonel Qaddafi. Driven into the mountains or exile by Libyan security forces, the group's members were among the first to join the fight against Qaddafi security forces Officially the fighting group does not exist any longer, but the former members are fighting largely under the leadership of Abu Abdullah Sadik [aka Abdelhakim Belhadj]."

Even at the time, there was considerable unease among Washington's strategic planners that the Obama Adminstration's embrace of a terror group with known links to al-Qaeda could prove to be a major blunder. "American, European and Arab intelligence services acknowledge that they are worried about the influence that the former group's members might exert over Libya after Colonel Qaddafi is gone, and they are trying to assess their influence and any lingering links to Al Qaeda," the Times noted.

Of course, those in the know at the various US intelligence agencies already had a pretty good sense of who they were backing, or at least the elements likely to be involved in any US operation. Specifically, the US knew that the areas from which it was drawing anti-Gaddafi opposition forces was a hotbed of criminal and terrorist activity.

In a 2007 study entitled "Al-Qa'ida's Foreign Fighters in Iraq: A First Look at the Sinjar Records" which examined the origins of various criminal and terrorist groups active in Iraq, the Combating Terrorism Center at the US Military Academy at West Point concluded that:

"Almost 19 percent of the fighters in the Sinjar Records came from Libya alone. Furthermore, Libya contributed far more fighters per capita than any other nationality in the Sinjar Records, including Saudi Arabia The apparent surge in Libyan recruits traveling to Iraq may be linked with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group's (LIFG) increasingly cooperative relationship with al-Qa'ida which culminated in the LIFG officially joining al-Qa'ida on November 3, 2007 The most common cities that the fighters called home were Darnah [Derna], Libya and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, with 52 and 51 fighters respectively. Darnah [Derna] with a population just over 80,000 compared to Riyadh's 4.3 million, has far and away the largest per capita number of fighters in the Sinjar records."

It was known at the time that the majority of the anti-Gaddafi forces hailed from the region including Derna, Benghazi, and Tobruk – the "Eastern Libya" so often referred to as anti-Gaddafi – and that the likelihood that al-Qaeda and other terror groups were among the ranks of the US recruits was very high. Nevertheless, they persisted.

Take the case of the February 17 Martyrs Brigade, charged by the US with guarding the CIA facility in Benghazi at which Ambassador Stevens was murdered. As the Los Angeles Times reported in 2012:

"Over the last year, while assigned by their militia to help protect the U.S. mission in Benghazi, the pair had been drilled by American security personnel in using their weapons, securing entrances, climbing walls and waging hand-to-hand combat The militiamen flatly deny supporting the assailants but acknowledge that their large, government-allied force, known as the Feb. 17 Martyrs Brigade, could include anti-American elements The Feb. 17 brigade is regarded as one of the more capable militias in eastern Libya."

But it wasn't just LIFG and al-Qaeda affiliated criminal groups entering the fray thanks to Washington rolling out the blood-stained red carpet.

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A longtime asset of the US, General Khalifa Hifter and his so-called Libyan National Army have been on the ground in Libya since 2011, and have emerged as one of the primary forces vying for power in post-war Libya. Hifter has a long and sordid history working for the CIA in its attempts to overthrow Gaddafi in the 1980s before being resettled conveniently near Langley, Virginia. As the New York Times reported in 1991:

The secret paramilitary operation, set in motion in the final months of the Reagan Administration, provided military aid and training to about 600 Libyan soldiers who were among those captured during border fighting between Libya and Chad in 1988 They were trained by American intelligence officials in sabotage and other guerrilla skills, officials said, at a base near Ndjamena, the Chadian capital. The plan to use the exiles fit neatly into the Reagan Administration's eagerness to topple Colonel Qaddafi.

Hifter, leader of these failed efforts, became known as the CIA's "Libya point man," having taken part in numerous regime change efforts, including the aborted attempt to overthrow Gaddafi in 1996. So, his arrival in 2011 at the height of the uprising signaled an escalation of the conflict from an armed uprising to an international operation. Whether Hifter was directly working with US intelligence or simply complimenting US efforts by continuing his decades-long personal war against Gaddafi is somewhat irrelevant. What matters is that Hifter and the Libyan National Army, like LIFG and other groups, became part of the broader destabilization effort which successfully toppled Gaddafi and created the chaotic hellscape that is modern Libya.

Such is the legacy of the US dirty war on Libya.

The Past is Prologue

It is September 2020. Americans are focused on an election between an Orange Fascist criminal and an old-school right-wing Democrat war criminal. Where Donald Trump projects chaos and disorder, Biden projects stability, order, and a return to normalcy. If Trump is the virus, then surely Biden is the cure.

It is September 2020. Libya prepares to enter its eighth year of civil war. Slave markets like the one in Bani Walid are as common as youth literacy centers were in Gaddafi's Libya. Armed gangs and militias wield power even in areas nominally under government control. A warlord regroups in the East as he looks to Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates for support.

It is September 2020 and the US-NATO war on Libya has faded to a distant memory as other issues like Black Lives Matter and police murder of Black youth have captured the public imagination and discourse.

But these issues are, in fact, united by the bond of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. The Libya once known as the "Jewel of Africa," a country that provided refuge for many sub-Saharan African migrant workers while maintaining independence from the US and the former colonial powers of Europe, is no more. In its place is a failed state that now reflects the kind of vicious anti-Black racism forcefully suppressed by the Gaddafi government.

Libya as the global exemplar of the exploitation and disposability of the black body.

Squint a little and you can see President Joe Biden getting the old band back together. Hillary Clinton welcomed into the Oval Office as an influential voice, someone to give words to the demented thoughts of the living corpse serving as Commander-in-Chief. Derek Chollet and Ben Rhodes laughing together as they buy another round at their favorite DC hangout, toasting to the re-establishment of order in Washington. Barack Obama as the éminence grise behind the political resurgence of the liberal-conservative dominant structure.

But in Libya, there is no going back, no fixing the past to escape the present.

Perhaps the same might be true of the United States.

AVmaster , 13 hours ago

Number of wars the boy king and his minions started: 6, that we know of: Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.

(Not withstanding the proxy wars during the "muslim spring" like in egypt)

Number of wars Trump has started: 0

This is NOT including the ongoing wars that trump inherited but has dialed back somewhat, like reduced troop presence in iraq/afghan.

fucking truth , 12 hours ago

Trump hasn't started any but he still feeds the beast, hopefully his next four will see a correction to this behaviour,one can only hope.

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GreatUncle , 3 hours ago

Has no choice.

The economic reality is the MIC is a big part of the US domestic economy.

Shut that down and you would go into a full blown depression.

If you build bullets, missile, bombs, F35's etc. they have to be used or you have to start scrapping them.

The issue though is not the MIC as such but the lack of any moral integrity and disregard for human life by those mentioned in the article. Once the country was put into this position by them it is much more difficult to extract.

Now I think those in the article should be prosecuted for not going to Congress to declare a war and fund it correctly as this is supposed to be the check and balance of a rogue president.

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Bollixed , 2 hours ago

Regarding the MIC, many of those companies consist of manufacturing entities comprised of engineers, factory infrastructure and logistics infrastructure funded by government spending that could realistically be 'retooled' to produce things that could benefit society instead of piss money away on the tools of destruction. America is in need of a massive infrastructure overhaul from our electric grid to our transportation modes to name just two. Nothing is preventing those MIC giants from refocusing their efforts toward a better America versus the current focus they are paid to undertake. It's a matter of priorities and right now I find their priorities misplaced and vulgar.

The money is available at their current funding rates, the manpower and brain power is there, what is lacking is the will to turn the ship around and start putting humans before profits. There is no need to go into a full blown depression as with the shut down of that capacity if those entities are given a mandate to redirect their output for the good of society and create things of lasting value. In other words, take the retooling mindset that turned refrigerator factories into weapons factories like they did in WW2 and take the weapons factories and turn them into entities for the betterment of society. And then wean them off of the government teat.

DeepStateThrombosis , 3 hours ago

Unused funds from the Pentagon can be redirected to the Wall and other Defense protections not known to the public at this time.

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DaiRR , 1 hour ago

DemoRats and NeoCons will try every way possible to keep the wars going.

The USA is incredibly blessed to have Donald J. Trump in the White House.

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muggeridge , 11 hours ago

To think Americans demonstrated in the millions to stop the Vietnam war exposed as a fraud by Daniel Ellsberg in the PENTAGON PAPERS. Obama did admit that the removal of Ghadaffy was his biggest foreign policy mistake. Clinton also in trouble over Tunisia while Secretary of State with US ambassador killed in 2012. She took responsibility but was found not to have acted improperly by US Congress. However her part in this tragedy remains an open question. Today the only Middle Eastern country still standing IRAN supported by China. Syria supported by Russia. Cold Wars never go away?


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GreatUncle , 3 hours ago

Cold war is an inevitable consequence of a MIC that must continually produce and expend munitions to keep its part of the economy going.
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scaleindependent , 10 hours ago

Final Jeopardy, genius!

What is Syria and Iran?


HIS acts against those countries ARE acts of war.

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muggeridge , 10 hours ago

Regime Change as our modus operandi to serve the cause of military superiority as if pre-set by computer.

How everything became war and the military became everything by Rosa Brooks Tales of the Pentagon.

Something funny happened on the way to the forum; Broadway musical. Hail Caesar?

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CheapBastard , 7 hours ago

Hey, military contractors have to put food on the table also, even if it means murdering millions of innocent people in Yugoslavia (like Clinton did) or in the middle east (like Bush and Obama did).

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GreatUncle , 3 hours ago

Yep some people don't get it.

With all the military contractors now moved into peaceful protests maybe we actually need more war to keep them gainfully employed.

Get the picture?


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SoilMyselfRotten , 3 hours ago

HIS acts against those countries ARE acts of war

Don't forget also blockading Venezuela


No1uNo , 9 hours ago

No Libya story is complete without mentioning David Shayler- the MI6 agent turned whistleblower who was tasked with blowing up Gaddafi in his car - but refused to do so when he was accompanied by his wife and children. (under the Tony Blair govt). -yep.
Shayler later went into a bizarre series of personas -which is understood by many as self preservation tactic - (testimony of mentally unstable is not recognised in court - so no threat).

Then there's the covert ratlines of gathering the ex-Libyan army weapons & shipping them to ISIS Syria via Turkey and White Helmets (see James Corbett) organised by HRC via Benghazi -so no rescue for US Ambassador & team (RIP) HRC prefer'd keep op covert. Carrier 50 miles off coast -HRC killed US Diplomats & support team. -Biden knew.

Also check out the courageous Dilyana Gaytandzhieva who runs armswatch .com and some SM in her name. for laypersons overview of extent of games-within-games & wheels-within-wheels in arms trade/ chem weapons "research". She's currently researching the Beirut bombings - which will be another revelation when it hits.

sauldaddy , 11 hours ago

That awkward moment when you find out the first Black President brought slavery BACK to Africa .....Q- That awkward moment when you find out the first Black President brought slavery BACK to Africa

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. . . _ _ _ . . . , 13 hours ago

Qaddafi kept African migrants out of the Mediterranean and away from Europe's shores.
Sarkozy couldn't allow that knowing what was in store for Europe.
He predicted what would happen to Europe were he to be deposed. He was right. Macron's (and Merkel's) policies are proof.
That and the gold dinar was his undoing.
.
P.S. Don't tell the leftists, but Libya was the only case of a successful socialist state. On second thought, it might be funny to see them publicly defending Qaddafi.

Ms No , 13 hours ago

That may work for a while when you pull black gold out of the ground, for a while. Oil declines and free **** armies breed faster. Then you are Saudi Arabia and we are about to see how that ends up.

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not dead yet , 12 hours ago

Libyan youth unemployment was over 30% because these spoiled kids with their families getting oil checks in the mail every month refused to do menial jobs. Qaddafi kept the black Africans out of the boats by letting them do the work the kids and other Libyans thought was beneath them. A lot of the money the Africans made they sent home which was spent in the local economies which increased jobs there. Libya also invested heavily in Africa which created lots of jobs. These actions kept the number of Africans headed to Europe a trickle. Once Qaddafi was gone so were all the jobs in Libya and the money that flowed into Africa dried up and jobs were lost. A lot of businesses the Libyans created in Africa were confiscated by the local governments and no doubt given to cronies who ran them into the ground.

No1uNo , 9 hours ago

Gaddafi thought wrongly that job description would save him. Also suggested trading oil for €uro's over dollar$, which blew the lid on powder keg. In the end they say it was the oil, though my thinking was DC think tanks didn't want a monied "Mexico" on south coast of Euroland - could make Europe too financially powerful & too difficult to control.

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. . . _ _ _ . . . , 6 hours ago

I had heard about selling oil for Euros in relation to Saddam, but not to Qaddafi. Qaddafi was about the gold Dinar.
??

No1uNo , 6 hours ago

Yep, it's what can happen if I'm not careful when I post and try to watch a documentary at the same time.
Thanks for your vigilance.

In case anyone's interested: ex-mossad agent - 57mins
https://archive.org/details/victor-ostrovsky-1995

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Steverino , 13 hours ago

Find the Libyan gold that dissapeard.... and one likely finds the source of the overthrow....

quanttech , 13 hours ago

try the french treasury...

Bill300 , 12 hours ago

Look no further than Hillary's brother. General Gage, a former Special Forces Colonel, had been hired by Hillary, et al, to assemble a merc army to secure Qaddafi's gold amidst the fog of war and transport it to Haiti to be laundered thru Hugh Rodham's little gold mine. Does anyone really think Obama sold enough books to buy a $12M seaside mansion in Massachusetts and the Washington DC home?

These people are so evil.

Justapleb , 12 hours ago

That's certainly titillating. Do you have a source that puts these things together?

I tried some Google searches, but I already know those searches are censored so it is not an easy thing to find

dark pools of soros , 4 hours ago

you gotta get your hands dirty if you want to know whats in the soil

DaCrustyDad , 13 hours ago

Imagine if some country invaded us and slaughtered about 23.5 million (apples for apples based on the 500k civilians killed out of 7,000,000)? Obama and the Clinton's should be playing basketball at Pelican Bay the rest of their lives at best.

quanttech , 12 hours ago

It's mind boggling.

Trump dropped 7400 bombs on Afghanistan in 2019. That would be like 60,000 bombs dropping on the US one year.

Arch_Stanton , 9 hours ago

Libya was a modern, secular Arab state. A model for the rest of Islam. Who the f@@k decided it was appropriate to reduce Libya to a 19th century sh1thole?

Shifter_X , 9 hours ago

Hillary ******* Clinton

Constitution101 , 6 hours ago

on instruction from the cabalist banksters who never permit a rival currency system.

Qaddafi's gold-backed dinar throughout Nth Africa would have exposed and displace their petrodollar scam in which they infinitely print their cronies untold trillion$.

end the fed, and all central banks.

Best Satan in Town , 6 hours ago

That's the story in a nutsh-ell

desertboy , 10 hours ago

The petrodollar centrality gets monotonously overplayed. For anyone who cares to look, the geopolitics of the West/NATO are the geopolitics of all its central bank owners as an interlinked group, who are keeping all their options open.

Destroying Libya went beyond the petrodollar to the fight for influence in Africa's future, where France's history in Africa has made it the designated hitter. Note the new CFR-type buzz on a "resurgent France" due to this role.

No1uNo , 8 hours ago

I maintained elsewhere on this thread, was advice of DC think tanks he was taken out. Because a well funded, well educated, low cost, labor factory resource state on south coast of eurozone makes europe too competitive to DC tank's interests. (and open Africa's growing economy to cheap - outside eurozone - euro profiting business interests).

Gaddafi was never a threat to Europe, but europe buying his oil and building his economy......different story.

No1uNo , 9 hours ago

B-I-N-G-O !
get your case of beer for that one!

not dead yet , 11 hours ago

Qaddafi would have not met with death if he only wanted to sell oil in the Gold Dinar. Instead he wanted the Gold Dinar as the currency for all of Africa. The system was being set up along with 4 central banks to manage African economic and monetary affairs when Libya was attacked. Libya also invested heavily in Africa creating lots of jobs and enhancing communications. Unlike the IMF and World Bank with their draconian edicts attached to their loans, like no loans for fossil fueled power plants and other eco garbage, almost guaranteeing default the Libyan Development Fund attached no such garbage to their loans making success possible. Europe was charging Africa $500 million a year for use of their satellites. Qaddafi ponied up $300 million of the $400 million needed to put up Africa's first satellite screwing Europe out of $500 million a year. Qaddafi was also the driving force for Africa for Africans and which kept US African command and it's troops out of Africa. Now the US has troops all over Africa. Qaddafi really was bad. Bad for Western exploitation of Africa.

At the time of Qaddafi's demise the Libyan Development Fund had $32 billion in banks around the world. Western governments and media tried to claim it was money stolen by Qaddafi. Last I knew the Libyan's, the rightful owners of that money, haven't seen a penny.

Constitution101 , 6 hours ago

great info.

got a good concise source?

dark pools of soros , 4 hours ago

you have to dig deep to get little nuggets of truth about Libya since so many sides want to tarnish and twist to push their agenda and greed on its riches

SmokeyBlonde , 12 hours ago

America, as a country, deserves whatever happens just for electing and re-electing Obama.

Far too many grifters, Bolsheviks, pedocrats, and sub-moron IQ feral ghetto rats oh-so-pleased with themselves for being so enlightened and bringing chaos to the whole F'n world.

ReflectoMatic , 11 hours ago

The Democrats are working with the globalist at the United Nations & World Economic Forum. The program being run is the destruction of the United States and elimination of humans, per instructions from "The Cult of Rasur", which is located in the jungle at Mount Rasur in Costa Rica but now renamed as the United Nations University For Peace. The university teaches occult and meditation and only graduates 20 students per year, those students then take positions of influence within the UN. The cult was founded by Maurice Strong & Dr Muller, Strong also created the Agenda 21 & World Economic Forum, plus in 1982, the more exclusive secret group of 300 called just "World Forum" which met in Vail Colorado near his hippie commune at the Baca Grande in the San Luis Valley.

The GAIA Theory which was converted into GAIA Religion at the Maurice Strong Hippie Commune in Colorado. David Perkins was there, apparently one of the first hippies to arrive at the commune around 1978. In this podcast we get a rare look into the mindset of the globalist and the creation of Agenda 21.

http://radiomisterioso.com/audio/David_Perkins_6_21_18.mp3

It's not clear if David Perkins & his partner, Chris O'Brian, are aware of Maurice Strong & Klaus Schwab conducting the special and secret World Forum of 300 at Vail in 1982. At that 1982 event the concepts David Perkins describes, combined with concepts gotten by paranormal activities at Mount Rasur in Costa Rica, were passed down to the 300 and thus began the creation that has brought the world to a standstill.

Chris O'Brian has an interesting podcast also, describing the Maurice Strong hippie commune, in this he describes meeting Lawrence Rockefeller at the commune.

https://slvoices.com/2019/12/21/the-mysterious-san-luis-valley-part-1/

I saw it posted here that Amschel Rothschild Said Rothschilds Have Met with Satan met the Devil in Colorado , now we know where in Colorado.

And finally, who the heck is this guy, the one in the middle? MJ-12 captured this photo of him in Hollywood in 1972, he was then usually seen in company of Curtis LeMay, grandson of the General who founded JPL NASA MJ-12, then in 1982 he was at that World Forum in Vail and in charge of covertly poisoning them all with LSD. He was born in Berkley or Alameda in 1951 while his mother was at theater watching "Day The Earth Stood Still". Seems there is a message which needs to be understood.

https://vault.myvzw.com/webcs/7V1ewnG0Xl

David Champaign, night manager at the Christie Lodge in Avon Colorado, can give further description and verification that the ultra-secret World Forum did occur.

If you listened to that podcast, there was mention of the "group of psychics" at the Baca hippie commune. The guy in the photo, the link just above, the photo was taken in the presence of Allen J Funk MJ-12, Funk's only friend took the photo, Bob Custer. Bob shared hotel rooms with the Stones & Monkeys while on concert tour as official photographer. The guy in the photo and Bob were taken one night, in Allen's white Cadillac convertible, to a house in the hills east of JPL Pasadena. There he met Bob's ex, Val, and Val's work associates, the work Val and associates did was some secret psychic project in Central America and perhaps in Colorado, usually Val just came over to Bob's house to visit when Val was not off at those remote locations. Secret about it they were.

Shifter_X , 8 hours ago

These are self-loathing humans. Imagine wanting to destroy the human race.

SMH

bobroonie , 13 hours ago

Obama bombed Libya in defense of Islamic terrorists he sold weapons to. 600 requests for more security from Ambassador Stevens unanswered.. But when defense contractor Osprey Global's Sidney Blumenthal called Clinton gave him special treatment. Lots of money to be made for a defense contractor and the Secretary of State that starts the war.

not dead yet , 12 hours ago

At the time Stevens died, he was not murdered he died of smoke inhalation as the invaders set the place on fire and the safe room wasn't air tight, Benghazi was the most dangerous place on earth for diplomats. Attempted murders and kidnappings of diplomats were so rife that most governments closed their missions and evacuated their people. Stevens was well aware of this and he went to Benghazi, the US Embassy is in Tripoli, anyway with his last meeting running guns with the Turks. By doing so he signed his death warrant. According to many at the time Stevens was begging for more security shortly before he left for Benghazi he was offered a military security detachment that was already in Tripoli and Stevens refused. Seems Stevens and Hillary didn't want the military to know what they were up to.

quanttech , 12 hours ago

the ambassador got what was coming to him. he was a terrorist, plain and simple.

the rest of the Americans were rescued ... by Qadaffi loyalists. the Americans are shy to admit this.

David2923 , 5 hours ago

Facts you probably do not know about Libya under Muammar Gaddafi:

• There are no electricity bills in Libya; electricity is free for all its citizens.

• There is no interest on loans, banks in Libya are state-owned and loans given to all its citizens at 0% interest by law.

• If a Libyan is unable to find employment after graduation, the state pays the average salary of the profession as if he or she is employed until employment is found.

• Should Libyans want to take up a farming career, they receive farm land, a house, equipment, seed and livestock to kick start their farms – all for free.

• Gaddafi carried out the world's largest irrigation project, known as the Great Man-Made River project, to make water readily available throughout the desert country.

• A home considered a human right in Libya. (In Qaddafi's Green Book it states: "The house is a basic need of both the individual and the family, therefore it should not be owned by others.")

• All newlyweds in Libya receive 60,000 Dinar (US$ 50,000 ) by the government to buy their first apartment so to help start a family.

• A portion of Libyan oil sales is credited directly to the bank accounts of all Libyan citizens.

• A mother who gives birth to a child receives US $5,000.

• When a Libyan buys a car, the government subsidizes 50% of the price.

• The price of petrol in Libya is $0.14 per liter.

• For $ 0.15, a Libyan local can purchase 40 loaves of bread.

• Education and medical treatments are free in Libya. Libya can boast one of the finest health care systems in the Arab and African World. All people have access to doctors, hospitals, clinics and medicines, completely free of charge.

• If Libyans cannot find the education or medical facilities they need in Libya, the government funds them to go abroad for it – not only free but they get US $2,300/month accommodation and car allowance.

• 25% of Libyans have a university degree. Before Gaddafi only 25% of Libyans were literate. Today the figure is 87%.

• Libya has no external debt and its reserves amount to $150 billion – though much of this is now frozen globally.

Here is photo of the man who helped kill the Col shaking hands with the Col. https://news.antiwar.com/2011/03/03/un-postpones-praising-gadhafis-human-rights-record/

Vivekwhu , 5 hours ago

You have explained why Libya was perfectly ripe for looting by the US Evil Empire and its slave states.

dark pools of soros , 5 hours ago

Yes I've been shining a light on this for years. The true history of Libya should red pill EVERYONE that can still think for themselves.

We are destroying George Washington statues while worshiping a black african american president who destroyed the one rare prosperous socialist African nation.. which now has slave trading!!!! all because it didn't share it's water to french/italian bottlers. And of course the Gold Dinar becoming the African currency.

Lokiban , 11 hours ago

Gadhaffi's two mistakes leading to this war.
Threaten to sell his sweet oil in gold dinars

Threaten French president Sarkozy to pull out all of his money out of France and reveal to the public the donations he made to the French presidential campaign of Sarkozy, which we know is illegal because foreigners can't donate money.

That sealed his fate. America needed to stop this gold for oil scheme just like it did in Iraq and French president Sarkozy's presidency was ont he line.

NuYawkFrankie , 12 hours ago

Slick Willy --> War Criminal

Chimp --> War Criminal

Obongo --> War Criminal

Hillarity --> War Criminal

Groper Joe --> War Criminal

Etc... etc... etc...

Are you at least BEGINNING to see a pattern here???

If not, you soon will do as 'the chickens come home to roost' and ZOG focusses it's attention on YOUR a$$!

Apeon , 11 hours ago

Apparently you are not old enough to remember Johnson

NuYawkFrankie , 8 hours ago

I'm holding "Johnson" as we speak... and the most I can accuse him of is being a naughty - sometimes a VERY naughty- boy. Looks like he's due for another spanking!

NAV , 2 hours ago

But in Libya, there is no going back, no fixing the past to escape the present.

Perhaps the same might be true of the United States.

Obama left this country and Libya in rags, what else is there to say.

Yet Obama lives, while Gaddafi is dead, a man who had the good of his people in mind and already was using primary water from which eventually all of Africa could be watered and developed into a paradise for his people, a people who live on a continent rich with more natural resources than any other.

But this could not be allowed by the Devil's Globalists who want to own all the world's resources in order to make beggars of all mankind. Obama was their man. He not only betrayed Africa but all men for a $40,000,000 pot of silver proffered by the world enemy of liberty - the DEEPSTATE.

NAV , 2 hours ago

But in Libya, there is no going back, no fixing the past to escape the present.

Perhaps the same might be true of the United States.

Obama left this country and Libya in rags, what else is there to say.

Yet Obama lives, while Gaddafi is dead, a man who had the good of his people in mind and already was using primary water from which eventually all of Africa could be watered and developed into a paradise for his people, a people who live on a continent rich with more natural resources than any other.

But this could not be allowed by the Devil's Globalists who want to own all the world's resources in order to make beggars of all mankind. Obama was their man. He not only betrayed Africa but all men for a $40,000,000 pot of silver proffered by the world enemy of liberty - the DEEPSTATE.

you know it makes sense , 5 hours ago

Who writes this crap and who believes a word of it ?.

No mention that Gaddafi planned to set up a new gold backed African money to sell his oil rather than the euro or the dollar. 143+ tons of gold and 140 tons of silver went missing.

www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2016/01/06/new-hillary-emails-reveal-true-motive-for-libya-intervention/

truepublica.org.uk/global/hillary-emails-reveal-nato-killed-gaddafi-stop-libyan-creation-gold-backed-currency/

It was because of this lie and NATO's involvement in the destruction of Libya that both Russia and China vowed never again to allow this to happen to another country

taglady , 7 hours ago

Trump: "lock her up" became "she's been through enough." What has she been through exactly? "Make America great again" became we need to bail out Boeing and the rest because of an "invisible enemy." It's invisible alright, because it doesn't exist. The only invisible enemy are the parasites shoveling our money into their own very deep pockets in every conceivable way. Like Biden and his entire family and the Clintons and the Obamas and many others have been doing for many years. Like Bush and Cheney made out so well after 911. That's how Gates and the pharmaceutical industry became so bloated while real Americans have struggled to make ends meet.

taglady , 7 hours ago

Interesting coalition between finance, government and media. Like when Bush announced the necessary, unconstitutional war and changes to our society after 911. We didn't get to vote on these changes. No referendum ever happened. Just an announcement in the media and media spin on public opinion, then preplanned actions by corrupt officials. This alliance was never more obvious than during the cv response. We are censored and silenced while liars and thieves are given the bully pulpit to beat us over the head with their idiocracy to enrich very few parasites, again. Then the public is blamed for the rogue actions of government/ business/media. America is bad. We just keep voting for these dummies. Except our voting system is run by the same corrupt dummies who keep getting re-elected. Hmmm. Just like they did to Kadafi and many others. Suddenly Libya is poor. What happened to all of Kadafi's gold? Probably the same thing that happened to the Pentagon trillions and SS "surplus" and public pensions across America. Taxation without representation leaves us broke, without a voice and broken. What are we going to do about it?

Iconoclast27 , 1 hour ago

The problem is you believe imperialism and colonialism has ended in the African continent when that clearly isn't the case, this Libyan regime change op being the latest example of interference you are claiming no longer exists.

John C Durham , 1 hour ago

Actually the end of colonialism that FDR ("Winston, Colonialism is the Cause of this War. This war is going to end all Colonialism".) wished for is hardly over. We got Democratic Party's Truman, not the great Henry Wallace, remember?

Libya only proves this true.

LEEPERMAX , 5 hours ago

America's "BOTCHED CIA OPERATION OF THE CENTURY" as they funneled GADDAFI WEAPONS from the PORT OF BENGHAZI into SYRIA as OBAMA & CO. completed their agenda to DESTABILIZE THE MIDDLE EAST and eventually ALL OF EUROPE.

NO MORE . . . NO LESS

QABubba , 5 hours ago

This is the very reason I sat out the 2016 election. They say citizens don't vote foreign policy but I did. The "We came, we saw, he died" statement illustrated that our leaders didn't have a clue as to the geopolitical damage we had done. The US supported a "no fly zone" in the UN Security Council. Russia supported it. Gaddafi declared his own, stating that none of his air force would fly. The US and their allies quickly "redefined" it to mean they could destroy his air force on the ground, and once destroyed, any of his antiaircraft guns, and once destroyed, any of his tanks and artillery (which don't fly), and his troop convoys.

Gaddafi's, Russia's, perhaps North Korea's big mistake was believing the US would stand by their agreement in the UN Security Council. This and the Eastward creep of Nato may very well be the deciding factor's in Putin's view that he has no responsible actors in the West to deal with. North Korea was watching. Any dream of getting a denuclearized North Korea just receded by about 50 years.

And of course, our presstitute media had a starring role as always. The average American thinks this was a just war, and knows nothing of the slave markets, and nothing about the flood of African immigrants, who are majority muslim, and have no plans whatsoever to assimilate, into Europe. The leaders of France and supposedly Great Britain have stabbed their citizens in the back, as they will now have to watch European culture destroyed.

Vivekwhu , 6 hours ago

Many thanks are due to Draitser for this excellent report on the vile activities of the US Evil Empire in Libya. The power motives have been laid bare, but the massive greed of the US/EU imperial elites have not been detailed. The greed for Libyan oil by France and Italy is well known but the US also looted Libyan gold, just as they looted Ukrainian gold after the 2014 Maidan coup.

By removing Gaddaffi (and who can forget Clinton's evil words "We came, we saw, he died") and looting the gold they scuppered the plans to create a gold-backed dinar for all of Africa, that would have challenged the use of USD, French-controlled "Franc" and other fiat currencies.

That would have been shocking for the US/EU imperial elite that regards Africa as their private fiefdom to loot at will.

Combined with a lust for power, the US/EU imperial elites have an insatiable greed. After all, what use is an empire if the elites can't gorge themselves at will?

lastugro , 10 hours ago

... and Medvedev led Russia abstained (did not veto the vote) at the UNSC session where the intervention was approved. Russia bears a tacit responsibility.

Michael Norton , 11 hours ago

Obama supplied ISIS with leftover weapons from the Libya operation to take out Bashar Assad in Syria. That didn't work out for him too well, did it? Got an ambassador and some CIA spooks killed in Benghazi.

dogfish , 9 hours ago

And Trump steals the oil, the oil that is desperately needed by the suffering Syrians. Trump is a real humanitarian.

Maghreb2 , 5 hours ago

Obama believed every word he was fed about the R2P Right to Protect fantasy concocted at the U.N. At the same time if you knew how dangerous the man was with his Green Revolution and Desert sorcery you would have had him killed.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/12/barack-obama-says-libya-was-worst-mistake-of-his-presidency

The first step of his plan was the Libyan African Gold Dinar which would have been a commodity backed gold cuerrency. This would have broken Rothschild and most of the colonial banking systems. On its own it was a just move but not even the Chinese could have an African Bloc form that fast with that much growth. Imploding the CFA system would have destroyed France as we know it and made it poorer than Poland.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mandrake/3520920/Now-Nat-Rothschild-hobnobs-with-Gaddafi-jnr.html

https://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/articles/573aeac75632a39742ed39a0/

Second factor was his ruthless plans to deal with his Islamic Nationalist and Monarchist "Brothers". Gaddafis Green revolution could have spread across the desert wastes and easily overthrown the Al Sauds and trapped Arab natioanlists in their citites. Not a powerful fighter but understood desert warfare. It was the cost of Soviet equipment and the French adapted technicals that made him weaker. The Wars of the Sahara desert like those of Polisario Front and Libyan Chad War were decided by mobility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_War

Finally there were reports amongst the occultists that the man was obsessed with the Occult and the Djinn. Giving a warlord his own banking system and access to African black Magic was enough even for the Jesuits to view the man as a threat to global peace. Rumours the djinns warned him of advance of air strikes and gave strength to his soldiers in the deserts made him a force to be reckoned with in his borders. The association with Abu Nidal is rumoured to have revealed things about the nature of these desert beings. If he had the innate gift for it his tribe probably would have joined us at some point. Reports he had fallen out with the real Green a man a sage and advisor to the Islamic leaders point to a major rupture with the Islamic creed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khidr

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senusiyya

https://eng-archive.aawsat.com/theaawsat/news-middle-east/colonel-gaddafi-using-african-magic-to-prolong-his-reign-libyan-rebel-officer

Only God can really judge whether his plan to emancipate Africa was his own power grab to free the continent or another mad man trying to join the global elite by enslaving them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hwiCkU73NA

Maghreb2 , 5 hours ago

The Moroccans learnt a lot from that mess. Islamic world lacks something like the Jesuits to keep these things under wraps.

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-goldman-sachs-libya/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USJCcZGbb7w

SmokeyBlonde , 4 hours ago

It would appear, at this point in time, that regardless of motive of his plan, the US-backed alternative has turned out far worse. The only positive result is more money in the pockets of the MIC and the opportunity to play war games in the desert.

Maghreb2 , 2 hours ago

Like I said he was a dangerous man. It takes one to rock the boat like he did. End of the day the system could have been put in place for the African Gold Standard to start to expand into areas that were tired of the Central African Franc system but it would have destroyed Rothschild and led to hundreds of million of Black Muslims having resources to throw at Israel.

https://www.investigaction.net/fr/macron-libye-la-rothschild-connection/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_African_CFA_franc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjyRchz8PFY

Making Chad, Senegal and Mali into something like Yugoslavia with Chinese and Russian Weaponry was beyond the imaginings of Africom. Would have lowered the birth rates with the development and solved the migration and economic crisis. Having these countries like Sweden would have also created living space for white liberals who were highly educated. Instead all the money vanished with the Kleptokrats. Its only insane Facists who want dead Africans on their doorsteps in Berlin and on the television that agree with this madness.

Euafrica, Eurabia could be avoided by making sure the Africans slow their birth rates through development and saving wealth rather than following it to Europe when the big men run with gold and dollars.

At the same time he was known as a devil to the Arabs and the dissidents. Sort of like Rockefeller with the company towns and corporate face. You ask the bastards to resign and why all these people has vanished and gives you statistics on how many electrical appliances have been handed out and says he was never in charge and you don't know how the system works.

https://www.countercurrents.org/janson170812.htm

Hard to say but he played the game. Robbed Bunker Hunt which was enough for us. Bunker C%nt as we called him when he tried to bring down the Morgue in Texas. Stuff like that is why the Illuminati are feared. Its hard for anyone to gauge what is going on and what the domino effects are. He was trained by the Americans and British and supplied with Socialist apparatus. Gianni Agnelli the suavest yid since Joseph kept NATO off his back. He had ties to the U.S deep State as well but that goes back to Wheelus.

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/24/business/libya-s-fiat-stake-sold-for-3-billion.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheelus_Air_Base

https://www.nytimes.com/1973/08/09/archives/bp-and-bunker-hunt-sue-coastal-states-on-libya-oil-alternative.html

Like we said about the Occult everyone has a backer but that man had demons watching over him. According to some. Thin line between a Djinn and Shaytan when politics and murder get involved.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/gaddafis-son-had-fingers-cut-off/news-story/ca6d3416e46441842ac8aca3edb11cb7

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcgNqHnjLK8

freedommusic , 5 hours ago

Failed nation states make a perfect platform for a profitable global criminal enterprise.

voting machine , 6 hours ago

Allen Dulles couldn't have scripted this operation any better.

This is right out of the CIA hand book. Regime change 101

Jackprong , 7 hours ago

As is painfully evident, there is no clear way to know how much was spent other than to take the word of those who prosecuted the war. With no congressional oversight, and no clear documentary record, the war on Libya disappears down the memory hole, and with it the idea that there is a separation of powers, Congressional authority to make war, or a functioning Constitution.

Got an answer for this: CUTBACKS!

bshirley1968 , 3 hours ago

" The story begins with Bernard Henri-Lévy, the French philosopher, journalist, and amateur foreign service officer who fancied himself an international spy. "

"Lévy was born in 1948 in Béni Saf , French Algeria , to an affluent Algerian Jewish family. "

you_do , 6 hours ago

The war against Libya is a crime .

The arguments for it are mostly fake .

The real reason is the threat against the `dollar`.

JeanTrejean , 6 hours ago

It's the Frenchmen Sarkozy and B.H. Levy who are responsible for this agression.

The USA and NATO (outside Europe) were just "dumb followers".

Vivekwhu , 6 hours ago

Nothing dumb about Obomber: why did he loot and murder in Libya (or Yemen, Ukraine, Syria etc)? Because he CAN!!!

Joiningupthedots , 21 minutes ago

Everything The West touches turns to rat ****.

Mercifully Russia recognised its mistake with Libya and stepped in to save Syria from the same fate.

Every country, its military bandits politicians involved in the unprovoked attack and subsequent destruction of Libya can be considered........WAR CRIMINALS.

Hopefully one day they will be stupid enough to attack Russia or China and be completely destroyed for their stupidity.

OTBorder@CA , 1 hour ago

First of all, Gadhafi gave an unconditional surrender that was brokered by international diplomatic channels over a month before our invasion. Obama & his minions ignored it. We knew many pilots that flew "missions" over Libya during this war & were involved in a massive bombing campaign. Don't forget the Wikileaks where France signed onto the war on the condition they got a % of Libya's gold. My wish is that someday history will tell the truth about the bastard Obama. Read the Lost Arab Spring by, Walid Phares to see all of the other Countries Obama tried to overthrow & have radical Islamic Terrorists replace the peaceful governments.

csc61 , 1 hour ago

The author gives these idiots far too much credit. People must come to the understanding that presidents and politicians (on all sides) simply do as they're told. It is the hidden hand, the international financiers, who are ruining the world. Politicians are mere pawns ... minions willing to sell their souls for a few short years of presumed power, only to scurry off afterward to play the role of elder statesmen. Politicians are nothing more than privileged degenerates who proved early in their political lives they could be easily corrupted and compromised. It is not them who do the damage directly - these things would happen no matter who's in charge. No, they're simply the ones pushed out front to sign documents and take blame for the world's ruination ... a small price they are willing to pay to feed their narcissistic appetites.

Mentaliusanything , 7 hours ago

I would caption that image as "Who is going first to the platform and rope... Biden thinks he has won a Prize and is excited , The Kenyan says you first Bro (loser) and the white Privileged woman is laughing as she says , You have nothing on Me... Bitches, I bury mine deep and dead, I do not swing

Scipio Africanuz , 8 hours ago

Fair enough..

Now that we've completed stage 1 of the harvest, perhaps we ought boost the Republic of Liberty, and hopefully, temper the anxious wrath of folks..

Libya was a catastrophic mistake, borne of hubris, vanity, intellectual rigidity, vainglory, and confusion. Hubris on the part of some, Sarkozy comes to mind, vanity on the part of some, Hillary Clinton comes to mind, confusion on the part of some, Obama comes to mind, and Ideological rigidity on the part of some, Biden comes to mind, and vainglorious pride on the part of some, the security establishment and their directors come to mind..

Having cleared that, it's no use crying over spilt milk, what's necessary, if the humility to acknowledge errors is available, is contributing rationally, and pernitently, to fixing the errors, and not by the same thinking that led to the errors, but fresh thinking that ought now understand that..

What's sown, is what's reaped, but MERCY it is, mitigates the harvests of depravity, via the provision of energy to restitute, and make amends..

The caveat however, is that mercy is NEVER deployed without REPENTANCE and RECALIBRATION,
which are the foundational pillars that make MERCY provide the energy to effect RESTITUTION..

Having clarified that, it's pertinent to inform, that Providence is NOT interested, in any way, shape, or form, in the damnation of anyone and why?

Well, which loving father is interested in the damnation of his children, no matter how depraved?

Still, patience ought not be mistaken for coddling and why?

With one, patience, the intent is to provide time for change..

With the other, coddling, the gambit is the turning of blind eyes to depravity..

But seeing as God, the Almighty Father is CONSISTENTLY Just, we can conclude then, that patience is the prerequisite for either Mercy or Damnation and how so?

Because if patience is deployed, and the depraved utilize it to change, then their salvation is self directed..

And if not, utilized that is, then their damnation as well, is self obtained..

And thus is the Justice and Honor of Divine Providence satisfied..

It's that simple..

And on that note VP Biden, we'll no longer refer to you as that, but as Joseph..

That ought awaken in you the grave responsibility on your shoulders, like that of the Biblical Joseph, whose father made for him, a "Coat of MANY colors.."

And if you be perceptive Joseph, you're now about to wear E Pluribus Unum (Coat of many colors..), created as a singular garment (ONE NATION..), for a reason (the glorification of Provident Divinity..
)

And the glorification?

That E Pluribus Unum (coat of many colors created as a singular garment..), ought demonstrate to all who see it worn, the goodness, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, and LOVE of the Provider of the Coat..

And considering Joseph, that in service of the Republic, you've not withheld the fruit of your loins, it's appropriate then, that you ought now demonstrate that love for the Republic, by putting it first, just as you'd put the fruits of your loins first, except above Divine Providence, known to you, as God Almighty..

So then Joseph, as we begin the next stage of the harvest, remember your oath that "you keep your promises..", you'll be judged by that oath..

And Joseph, "a promise is a debt..", it MUST be paid..

And to boost you energetically, here's Parton the Sweet Voiced Nightingale..

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h7I_9MMcWvk

Good luck and God speed...

[Sep 12, 2020] Never Forget- Smoking Gun Intel Memo From 1990s Warned Of 'Frankenstein The CIA Created' - Zero Hedge

Sep 12, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

As Americans pause to remember the tragic events of September 11, 2001 which saw almost 3,000 innocents killed in the worst terror attack in United States history, it might also be worth contemplating the horrific wars and foreign quagmires unleashed during the subsequent 'war on terror'.

Bush's so-called Global War on Terror targeted 'rogue states' like Saddam's Iraq, but also consistently had a focus on uprooting and destroying al-Qaeda and other armed Islamist terror organizations (this led to the falsehood that Baathist Saddam and AQ were in cahoots). But the idea that Washington from the start saw al-Qaeda and its affiliates as some kind of eternal enemy is largely a myth.

Recall that the US covertly supported the Afghan mujahideen and other international jihadists throughout the 1980's Afghan-Soviet War, the very campaign in which hardened al-Qaeda terrorists got their start. In 1999 The Guardian in a rare moment of honest mainstream journalism warned of the Frankenstein the CIA created -- among their ranks a terror mastermind named Osama bin Laden .

1998 CNN still of Osama bin Laden, right, along with Egyptian jihadist Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan, CNN/Getty Images

But it was all the way back in 1993 that a then classified intelligence memo warned that the very fighters the CIA previously trained would soon turn their weapons on the US and its allies. The 'secret' document was declassified in 2009, but has remained largely obscure in mainstream media reporting, despite being the first to contain a bombshell admission.

A terrorism analyst at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research named Gina Bennett wrote in the 1993 memo "The Wandering Mujahidin: Armed and Dangerous," that --

"support network that funneled money, supplies, and manpower to supplement the Afghan mujahidin" in the war against the Soviets, "is now contributing experienced fighters to militant Islamic groups worldwide."

UNCLASSIFIED

SECRET/NOFORWNOCONTRACT/ORCON

RELEASED IN FULL

United States Department of State
Bureau of Intelligence and Research

WEEKEND EDITION

21-22 August 1993

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF STATE
REVIEW AUTHORITY: FRANK II PEREZ
DATEj'CASK ID: 23 NOV 2007 200605437

The Wandering Mujahidin: Armed and Dangerous

During the war in Afghanistan, eager Arab
youths volunteered en masse to fight a historic "jihad"
against the Soviet •'infidel." The support network
that funneled money, supplies, and manpower to sup-
plement the Afghan mujahidin is now contributing
experienced fighters to militant Islamic groups world-
wide. Veterans of the Afghan jihad are being inte-

... ... ...

dump hundreds more devout fighters into the net-
work. exacerbating the problems of governments that
are accepting the wandering mujahidin.

* * *

When the Boys Come Home

The concluding section contains the most revelatory statements, again remembering these words were written nearly a decade before the 9/11 attacks :

US support of the mujahidin during the Afghan war will not necessarily protect US interests from attack.

...Americans will become the targets of radical Muslims' wrath. Afghan war veterans, scattered throughout the world, could surprise the US with violence in unexpected locales.

https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890

ue until wc throw India out," apparently is well armed
and operating about 80 miles southeast of Srinagar.

Mujahidin in Every Corner

Beyond the Middle East and South Asia, small
numbers of Afghan war veterans are taking up causes
from Somalia to the Philippines. Mujahidin connections
to the larger network heighten the chances that even
an ad hoc group could carry out destructive insurgent
attacks. Veterans joining small opposition groups can
contribute significantly to their capabilities; therefore,
some militant groups are actively recruiting returning
veterans, as in the Philippines where the radical Mus-
lim Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) reportedly is using muja-
hidin members' connections to the network to bolster
funding and broker arms deals. The ASG is believed
to have carried out the May bombings of Manila's
light rail system.

Focus on the United States

The alleged involvement of veterans of the Af-
ghan war in the World Trade Center bombing and the
plots against New York targets arc a bold example of
what tactics some fop^r mujahidin are willing in use
in their ongoing jihad (see box, p. 3). US support of
the mujahidin during the Afghan war will not neces-
sarily protect US interests from attack.

The growing perception by Muslims that the US
follows a double standard with regard to Islamic issues --
particularly in Iraq, Bosnia, Algeria, and the Isracli-
occupicd territories -- heightens the possibility that
Americans will become the targets of radical Muslims'
wrath. Afghan war veterans, scattered throughout the
world, could surprise the US with violence in unex-
pected locales.

(Gina BennoB. INfVTNA)

There it is in black and white print: the United States government knew and bluntly acknowledged that the very militants it armed and trained to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars would eventually turn that very training and those very weapons back on the American people .

And this was not at all a "small" or insignificant group, instead as The Guardian wrote a mere two years before 9/11 :

American officials estimate that, from 1985 to 1992, 12,500 foreigners were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and urban guerrilla warfare in Afghan camps the CIA helped to set up .

But don't think for a moment that there was ever a "lesson learned" by Washington.

Frankenstein the CIA created

So he found a different theatre for his holy war and achieved a different sort
of martyrdom. Three years ago, he was convicted of planning a series of
massive explosions in Manhattan and sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Hampton-el was described by prosecutors as a skilled bomb-maker. It was
hardly surprising. In Afghanistan he fought with the Hezb-i-Islami group of
mujahideen, whose training and weaponry were mainly supplied by the CIA.

He was not alone. American officials estimate that, from 1985 to 1992,12,500

foreigners were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and urban guerrilla

warfare in Afghan camps the CIA helped to set up.

Instead the CIA and other US agencies repeated the 1980s policy of arming jihadists to overthrow US enemy regimes in places like Libya and Syria even long after the "lesson" of 9/11. As War on The Rocks recounted :

Despite the passage of time, the issues Ms. Bennett raised in her 1993 work continue to be relevant today. This fact is a sign of the persistence of the problem of Sunni jihadism and the "wandering mujahidin." Today, of course, the problem isn't Afghanistan but Syria. While the war there is far from over, there is already widespread nervousness, particularly in Europe, about what will happen when the foreign fighters return from that conflict.

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Receive a daily recap featuring a curated list of must-read stories.

On 9/11 we should never forget the innocent lives lost, but we should also never forget the Frankenstein of jihad the CIA created .

* * *

The U.S. State Dept.'s own numbers at the height of the war in Syria: access the full report at STATE.GOV

19 June 2015, From US Department of
State, Country Report on Terrorism 2014:
"The rate of foreign terrorist fighter travel to Syria
[during 2014]- totaling more than 16,000 foreign
terrorist ficjhters from more than 90 countries as
of late December - exceeded the rate of foreign
terrorist fighters who traveled to Afghanistan and
Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, or Somalia at any point in
the last 20 years"

me name=

[Sep 11, 2020] MSM's attempts to spin Trump's attacks on senseless wars as disrespect for military at large are a dismal distortion of reality -- RT Op-ed

Notable quotes:
"... By Tony Cox , a US journalist who has written or edited for Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers. ..."
"... "Trump has lost the right and authority to be commander in chief," ..."
"... "despicable comments" ..."
"... "Killing generals could get to be a habit with me." ..."
"... "right and authority" ..."
"... "when it's required for national security and a last resort." ..."
"... "pattern of public statements ..."
"... Like this story? Share it with a friend! ..."
Sep 11, 2020 | www.rt.com

MSM's attempts to spin Trump's attacks on senseless wars as disrespect for military at large are a dismal distortion of reality 11 Sep, 2020 12:06 Get short URL © Getty Images / David Dee Delgado 29 Follow RT on RT

By Tony Cox , a US journalist who has written or edited for Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers. The New York Times and CNN are desperate to paint Donald Trump as an enemy of the military, due to his desire not to get involved in pointless wars. But this is simply not true, and Trump has the backing of many soldiers.

Someone should tell the New York Times, CNN and other mainstream media outlets that soldiers don't actually like getting killed or maimed for no good reason. Nor do they like generals and presidents who spill their blood in vain.

Alas, ignorance of these obvious truths probably isn't the issue. This is likely just another case of the biggest names in news pretending to not get the point so they can take the rest of us along for a ride in their confidence game of alternative reality.

The latest example is the New York Times spinning President Donald Trump's critique this week of Pentagon leadership and the military industrial complex as disrespect for the military at large. "Trump has lost the right and authority to be commander in chief," the Times quoted retired US Marines General Anthony Zinni as saying. Zinni cited Trump's alleged "despicable comments" about the nation's war dead – reported last week by The Atlantic , citing anonymous sources – as one of the reasons Trump "must go."

ALSO ON RT.COM After Trump helps crush ISIS, end Korea nuke tests and avoid new wars, Republican haters warn he 'imperiled America's security'

Never mind that Trump and all on-the-record administration sources denied The Atlantic's report. The Times couldn't resist when the pieces seemed to fit so well together for the military's latest propaganda campaign against Trump. First the president disses the troops, calling them "losers" and "suckers," then he has the temerity to say Pentagon leaders want to fight wars to keep defense contractors happy.

Except the pieces don't fit. The many people who occupy so-called boots on the ground don't have the same interests as the few people who send them to war. In fact, combat troops are given reason to hate the generals who send them to die when there's not a legitimate national security reason for the war they're fighting. And the US has fought a long line of wars that didn't serve the nation's national security interests. Even when a war is justified, the interests of top brass and front-line soldiers often clash.

Remember that great 1967 war movie, ' The Dirty Dozen' ? A group of 12 soldiers who were condemned to long prison sentences or execution in military prison for their crimes were sent on a 1944 suicide mission to kill high-ranking German officers at a heavily defended chateau far behind enemy lines. After succeeding in the mission and escaping the Germans, the lone surviving convict, played by tough-guy actor Charles Bronson, told the mission leader, "Killing generals could get to be a habit with me."

ALSO ON RT.COM NATO cannot survive a second Trump term

So no, New York Times, speaking out against ill-advised wars does not equal bashing the military. And sorry, General Zinni, but generals, defense contractors and their media mouthpieces don't get to decide who has the "right and authority" to be commander in chief. The voters decided that already, and they expressed clearly that they don't want senseless and endless wars and foreign interventions.

The Times cited General James McConville, the Army's chief of staff, as saying Pentagon leaders would only recommend sending troops to combat "when it's required for national security and a last resort." And no, it wasn't a comedy skit. What's the last US war or combat intervention that measured up to that standard? Let's just say the late Bronson, who died in 2003 at the age of 81, was a young man the last time that happened.

CNN tried a similar ploy on Sunday, while trying to sell the "losers" and "suckers" story in an interview with US Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie. Host Dana Bash said the allegations fit a "pattern of public statements " by the president because Trump called US Senator John McCain a "loser" in 2015 and said McCain shouldn't be considered a hero for being captured in the Vietnam War. She repeatedly suggested to Wilkie, who didn't take the bait, that Trump's attacks on McCain, who died in 2018, showed disrespect for the troops.

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Apparently, this follows the same line of propagandist thought which told us that saying there are rapists among the illegal aliens entering the US from Mexico – which is undeniably true – equals saying all Mexicans are rapists. In CNN land, a bad word about McCain is a bad word about all soldiers.

McCain was a warmonger who didn't mind getting US troops killed or backing terrorist groups in Syria. If he had his way , many more GIs would be dead or disabled, because the intervention in Syria would have been escalated and the US might be at war with Iran. Soldiers wouldn't want their lives wasted in such conflicts.

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All wars are hard on the people who have to fight them, but senseless wars are spirit-crushing. An average of about 17 veterans commit suicide each day in the US, according to Veterans Administration data . Veterans account for 11 percent of the US adult population but more than 18 percent of suicides.

The media's deceiving technique of trying to pretend that ruling-class chieftains and front-line grunts are in the same boat reflects a broader campaign of top-down revolution against populism. The military is just one of several pro-Trump segments of the population that must be turned against the president. Other pro-Trump segments, such as police , are demonized and attacked.

Trump has managed to keep the US out of new wars and has drawn down deployments to Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan – despite Pentagon opposition. His rival, Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden, can be expected to rev up the war machine if he takes charge. His foreign policy adviser, Antony Blinken, lamented in a May interview with CBS News that Trump had given up US "leverage" in Syria.

Trump also has turned around the VA hospital system, ending decades of neglect that left many veterans to die on waiting lists.

Like past campaigns to oust Trump, the notion that he's not sufficiently devoted to the troops might be a tough sell. No matter how good their words may sound, the people who promote endless wars without clear objectives aren't true supporters of the rank and file.

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[Sep 11, 2020] DoD Confirms $10-$20 Billion COVID Bailout For Contractors After Trump Blasted Military-Industrial Complex -

Sep 11, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

DoD Confirms $10-$20 Billion COVID Bailout For Contractors After Trump Blasted Military-Industrial Complex by Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2020 - 09:45 Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print

This is surely the last thing the American people want to hear, but it does confirm President Trump's recent statements saying that top Pentagon brass essentially seeks out constant wars to keep defense contractors "happy": the Department of Defense plans to cut major military contractors a $10 billion to $20 billion COVID bailout check .

Defense One reports : "With lawmakers and the White House unable to come to an agreement on a new coronavirus stimulus package, it's unlikely that money requested to reimburse defense contractors for pandemic-related expenses will reach these companies until at least the second quarter of 2021, according to the Pentagon's top weapons buyer."

Defense undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, Ellen Lord, in recent statements has indicated the private defense firm stimulus would cover the period from March 15 to Sept. 15 and is estimated at "between $10 and $20 billion."

President Trump at Andrews Air Force Base, via AP.

"Then we want to look at all of the proposals at once," Lord said at a press briefing Wednesday. "It isn't going to be a first in, first out, and we have to rationalize using the rules we've put in place what would be reimbursable and what's not."

And strongly suggesting that it won't be the last of such stimulus for defense firms who have already profited immensely off post 9/11 'wars of choice' launched under Bush and Obama, Lord said , "I would contend that most of the effects of COVID haven't yet been seen."

To recall, here's what Trump said at the start of this week :

"I'm not saying the military's in love with me," Trump added , as he advocated for the removal of U.S. troops from "endless wars" and lambasted NATO allies that he says rip off the U.S. "The soldiers are."

"The top people in the Pentagon probably aren't because they want to do nothing but fight wars so all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy," he added.

"Some people don't like to come home, some people like to continue to spend money," the president said. "One cold-hearted globalist betrayal after another, that's what it was."

The "outrage" that followed included reporters claiming that Trump's words were "unprecedented".

https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890

But that's far from the truth, as Glen Greenwald reminded his fellow journalists:

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Well over a half-century ago, Eisenhower warned, "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex . The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

And further: "We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

[Sep 11, 2020] Tracey- Stop Crying Foul Over Fascism

Creepy Joe used to be a stanch neoliberal, who promoted open militarism, empowerment of multinationals at the expense of working people; two feature of neofascism.
Sep 11, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Michael Tracey via UnHerd.com,

The Left justifies extreme and violent action by framing Trump as an existential threat to America...

It might not seem immediately apparent that Joe Biden would have anything in common with insurrectionary anarchists. After all, Biden has been deeply entrenched in the uppermost echelons of American political power for nearly five decades straight -- whereas insurrectionary anarchists generally seek to overthrow those systems, by violent force if necessary.

The former Vice-President is not exactly the type you would imagine clad in all-black combat-style street apparel, hurling commercial-grade fireworks at police officers. Rather, he drafted the infamous 1994 omnibus crime bill in concert with the National Association of Police Organizations. He is even known to venerate the arcane institutionalist ethos of the US Senate -- whereas to insurrectionary anarchists, such institutions could only be tools of oppression.

But the Trump Era has an odd way of bringing about unexpected ideological convergences. In the announcement video that formally kicked off his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden paid homage to what he called the "courageous group of Americans" who descended upon Charlottesville, VA in August 2017 to confront an assembly of Right-wing rally-goers. Among that "courageous group" were Left-wing activist factions broadly classified under the banner of "antifa".

For Biden, what transpired in Charlottesville was a "defining moment," and formed the basis for his decision to launch a third campaign for the presidency at age 76. While Biden did herald generic American idealism in that announcement video -- which would be anathema to most insurrectionary anarchists -- in the gravity he assigned to the Charlottesville episode, he also affirmed a core tenet of the "antifa" worldview: the notion that a uniquely pressing fascistic threat has gripped the country, and crushing this threat is a matter of unparalleled world-historic urgency.

Certainly, if you picked any "antifa" member at random, there'd be an almost 0% chance that they would express any kind of personal enthusiasm for Joe Biden. But there'd be a virtually 100% chance that they'd express a great deal of enthusiasm for the theory that "fascism" is an accurate characterisation of America's current state of governance. Biden would be similarly enthused to present a variation of this analysis, albeit from a slightly different ideological angle. He typically intones things like, "This is not who we are", rather than "All Cops Are Bastards".

Still, where Biden is united with "antifa" is in assigning such outsized importance to the role of small-time "fascist" agitators like the ones who gathered that weekend three years ago in Charlottesville (despite ultimately being outnumbered by Left-wing activists) on account of the validation they are purported to have received from Donald Trump. For both Biden and "antifa," this dynamic constitutes the chief prism through which contemporary American political affairs must be viewed.

And for both Biden and "antifa," this mode of analysis has been hugely successful. "Antifa" has succeeded in stoking nationwide insurrectionary fervour on a scale unseen in decades. Given their opposition to Trump as the alleged fascist-in-chief, as well as their appropriation of the "Black Lives Matter" protest mantle, they've received an extraordinary amount of mainstream liberal legitimation.

https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890

Democratic Party operatives have even gone so far as to exalt "antifa" activists as the modern-day equivalents of US soldiers fighting in World War II -- while apparently exhibiting no embarrassment for invoking this comparison.

Another clear beneficiary of the "fascism" panic, somewhat paradoxically, has been Biden. A supreme irony of the outsized role that "anti-fascism" has played in post-2016 US political discourse -- as popularised by both liberals and leftists, who often claim to be at odds with each other but nonetheless overwhelmingly agree on the underlying "fascism" prognosis -- is that it has ultimately limited the possibility of actual Left-wing policy reform.

Democratic presidential primary voters had been traumatised by the non-stop barrage of Trump-related hysteria churned out each and every day by profit-driven corporate media outlets, and laboured under the sincere belief that Trump's America bears some bonafide relation to Weimar Germany. As such, a plurality were understandably uninterested in foundational reform to the Democratic Party.

That was bad news for socialist Bernie Sanders, who ended up losing handily in the 2020 primaries to a former Vice President whose entire campaign was predicated on little more than restoring the pre-2016 Democratic Party to power.

And in a way, you can't particularly blame those Biden voters. Because if your main sources of information tell you for years on end that the reins of state have been seized by an out-and-out fascist, who is fuelling a siege of "Nazi" street agitators, whatever deficiencies the Democratic Party might have at the moment are of little or no concern. Now even Sanders himself has called for a "united front" against Trump ahead of the election, seeming to suggest that the precedent of Francisco Franco is historically apt. Wasn't the whole problem with Franco that he couldn't be voted out?

Never mind that Trump would have to be quite a feckless fascist to allow himself to be constantly maligned in the country's major media, plotted against by his own administration underlings, and impeached. The decidedly unsexy reality is that Trump has been a fairly weak executive, at least relative to his predecessors in the postwar era.

But his radically unorthodox communications style belies any dispassionate assessment of this record, thus the fascism-mongering persists more-or-less unabated. And for all the warnings of a Reichstag Fire moment always supposedly being around the corner, the past six months of Covid and riots were a missed opportunity for any genuine fascist seeking to consolidate power. Trump appears largely content with issuing inflammatory tweets.

So as riots continue around the country, and corporate news networks describe post-protest scenes with raging infernos as "mostly peaceful", the temptation can be to write this off as mere partisan side-taking. Certainly there's an element of that -- most journalists desperately don't want to see Trump win in November.

But thanks to the prevailing "fascism" framework, their opposition to Trump isn't just a matter of ordinary election-year preference. It's imbued with existential, civilisation-altering significance. How could anyone in their right mind not do everything within their capacity to ensure the defeat of fascism? Once you accept the premise that fascism does in fact accurately describe the current state of American governance, all bets are off -- journalistically and otherwise.

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So even if the "anti-fascists" in the equation are burning down cities, they will still never exist on the same moral plane as the actual "fascists" whose champion occupies the White House. Hence, riots which result in the destruction of huge swaths of Kenosha, WI magically become a "mostly peaceful" affair according to CNN and the New York Times .

Yes, journalists also presumptively ascribe a certain virtue to any protests that occur with the imprimatur of "Black Lives Matter". But racial disparities have been a fact of American life since the dawn of the republic. The unavoidable explanation for why they've taken on such frantic energy in the past several months is the alleged spectre of fascism, namely Trump. With a Democratic President, even one as vanilla as Biden, there will doubtless be future race-based controversies. But they won't have the cosmic weight as those that occur when a "fascist" president also looms.

Adding to the growing list of ironies, Trump's primary conception of the presidency has less been Fuhrer, than "Pundit-in-Chief", whereby he proudly brandishes the role of world's loudest media critic -- with media criticism having been one of his life-long passions. Given that experience, Trump knows how to expertly pry at tensions in how pundit narratives get constructed, and the "peaceful protest" cliché provides all the material that could ever be desired in that respect. Kayleigh McEnany, in tweeting a photo of a recent Trump air hanger rally in Pennsylvania, described the attendees (only half-jokingly) as "peaceful protesters".

The reason she did this is because if one follows the recent patterns of media nomenclature, any and all "peaceful protesters" should be painstakingly accommodated, even if their gatherings produce widespread arson attacks or increase the Covid-19 infection rate. There is no impartial explanation for why the "peaceful protests" of this past summer deserved praise, adulation, and rousing defences from the standpoint of pandemic mitigation. Again, only does this make sense when inserted into the blinkered fascism vs. anti-fascism context.

One wonders if these protesters and rioters have ever paused to consider why it is that so many establishment media outlets are so consistently eager to advocate on their behalf, with the phrase "largely peaceful" having been stretched well past the point of absurdity. And one also wonders why so many powerful forces are so willing to join in affirming their "anti-fascism" worldview -- up to and including, in his own way, Joe Biden. For all the talk about dismantling systems of oppression, those who actually wield power in 2020 America seem to view the "fascism vs. antifascism" dichotomy as awfully convenient to their own self-preserving interests.

[Sep 06, 2020] Official color revolution course in Washington and Li university

Slightly edited Google translation
The graduates can expect to get jobs in the State Department, USAID, or NED. For some BLM and Antifa might be an attractive career opportunity.
Sep 06, 2020 | aftershock.news

If after reading the headline you thought that is is one of the Russian universities got financing from NED and is preparing to teach our grant-eaters "the science of color revolutions", then you are mistaken.

It is the USA Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, which now offers 101 of color revolution preparation in a course called "Overthrow the State" for its American students and the subject of the course is the USA, not the xUSSR space.

According to the course description, it "puts every student at the head of a popular revolutionary movement that seeks to overthrow the current government and create a better society." Among questions discussed:

These are the questions that the University course answers. To get a diploma in the course "how to overthrow the state" you will need to pass 3 tests. It will be necessary to write your "Manifesto" after studying historical examples and revolutionary thought from Franz Fanon to Che Guevara, Mahatma Gandhi and representatives of the revolutionary movement. You will also have to "write a compelling essay about rewriting history" and a "white paper" (white paper is a kind of business plan, but it is written for an audience that is not related to business).

Univrsity of Washington and Lee is so progressive, that in July the faculty voted to remove the name of Robert Li from the name of the University.

Course Offerings

AFY WRIT-100-18 FY WR SEM: OVERTHROW THE STATE 3 FW Gildner, Robert M. (Matt) No Yes 15 W 4:00p-5:30p
M 4:00p-5:30p
Class will meet in person on Wednesdays only.
All other class meetings will be virtual.
Newcomb 116
Payne ARR

[Aug 29, 2020] MoA - 'Mostly Peaceful' Rioting And Looting Is Helping Trump's Campaign

Notable quotes:
"... 'Mostly peaceful protests' are like the 'moderate rebels' in Syria - propaganda constructs that do not exist in the real world. The people who owned the burning cars and whose businesses were destroyed will not be relieved by such phrasing. ..."
"... Joe Biden's attempt to swing Republican voters to his side has failed . At the same time he has rejected many of the issues progressives favored. This will hurt the election turn out the Democrats will need. Add to that the unrest which plays into Trump's hands. The Democrats who fear that are right ..."
"... he sole focus on Antifa as the problem Imo just shows the power of the media and politicians to shape the narrative. ..."
Aug 29, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

'Mostly Peaceful' Rioting And Looting Is Helping Trump's Campaign james , Aug 27 2020 17:46 utc | 1

The Civil War of 2020 continues apace.

2020

bigger

After three months of continuous clashes in Portland between Antifa rioters , who hide behind peaceful protests, and the police, the mayor is finally concerned about the damage :

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler said Wednesday he hasn't done enough to focus on damages caused by some city protests over the last three months and the fallout from coronavirus. He called on the community to help him come up with better solutions to city issues.

During the last months the Magnificent Mile in Chicago was looted - twice. Yesterday new riots and looting occurred in Minneapolis after a rumor of another police killing incited some people :

Police Chief Medaria Arradondo tried to dispel rumors that spread on social media about the death of the unidentified Black man, who was suspected in a Wednesday afternoon homicide and fatally shot himself on the Nicollet Mall as officers approached several hours later. His death, which was captured on city surveillance video and released by police within 90 minutes, nonetheless sparked protests and unrest in the heart of downtown.

The video confirmed the police account of what happened and showed the man glancing over his shoulder before pulling out the gun and firing, then collapsing to the ground as a half-dozen witnesses ran away with their hands in the air. The officers, one of whom had his gun drawn, shooed a remaining witness away and kicked the suspect's gun away before performing chest compressions.

Last Sunday police in Kenosha, Wisconsin proved to be too incompetent to arrest a man they had already had under control . They shot him 7 times into the back when he was trying to get into his car. Nights of rioting followed. Buildings were burned down and businesses were looted.

Yesterday a white teen with a semi-automatic weapon had the stupid idea to join others in 'protecting the businesses' in Kenosha from further looting. He ended up killing two people and wounding more after he was attacked by some of the rioters. The teen was arrested and he is facing charges but I doubt that he is guilty of more than sheer stupidity and manslaughter in self defense.

The cycle of violence will likely continue. There are too many racist in the police and the level of U.S. police training seems to be abysmal. There is also too much tolerance for violence within the general community.

Politically this plays into Trump's law and order campaign. The Democrats have lauded Black Live Matters and the protests but have hardly spoken out against the rioting and looting that comes with them.

This CNN chyron from yesterday evening is an expression of their position:


bigger

'Mostly peaceful protests' are like the 'moderate rebels' in Syria - propaganda constructs that do not exist in the real world. The people who owned the burning cars and whose businesses were destroyed will not be relieved by such phrasing.

Joe Biden's attempt to swing Republican voters to his side has failed . At the same time he has rejected many of the issues progressives favored. This will hurt the election turn out the Democrats will need. Add to that the unrest which plays into Trump's hands. The Democrats who fear that are right :

"There's no doubt it's playing into Trump's hands," said Paul Soglin, who served as mayor of Madison, on and off, for more than two decades. "There's a significant number of undecided voters who are not ideological, and they can move very easily from Republican to the Democratic column and back again. They are, in effect, the people who decide elections. And they are very distraught about both the horrendous carnage created by police officers in murdering African Americans, and ... for the safety of their communities."

Trump, of course, is positioning himself as the antidote to urban unrest. "So let me be clear: The violence must stop, whether in Minneapolis, Portland or Kenosha," Vice President Mike Pence declared in his Republican convention speech Wednesday night, with Trump looking on. "We will have law and order on the streets of this country for every American of every race and creed and color."

Republicans had chided Joe Biden and other Democrats for not calling out the violence in the aftermath of the Blake shooting. Biden immediately addressed the shooting, but didn't condemn the ensuing violence until Wednesday in a video posted on social media.

Despite Trump's failure to bring the pandemic under control his job approval rating continues to be high while Biden's lead in the polls is shrinking . The United States seem to have a higher tolerance for avoidable death by guns or viruses than other societies have. It is not the only point that makes it exceptional .

Posted by b on August 27, 2020 at 17:39 UTC | Permalink

thanks b... it really looks like an empire in fast decline.... i don't believe the usa constitution took into consideration the idea of corporations... also as you note - the tolerance for violence or death as with covid is indeed much greater... i guess more people have to have guns as it is in their constitution, and so much for public medicare... it is like a dream about public finance and somewhere way off in the distant future... i don't believe it is going to matter who wins this coming election, as the divisiveness is so pronounced, it will be hard to build bridges.. it seems like no one is interested in building bridges between the opposing sides either... all the politicians are mostly looking after corporations and special interest lobbies - israel and etc. etc... sad kettle of fish...


sabre , Aug 27 2020 18:09 utc | 5

Very fair analysis, I enjoyed this piece. You are absolutely right, the terrible training and general ineptitude of the police is at the core of the problem. The protesters recognize this and there are many salient examples to fuel the outrage. However, the solutions they call for don't address this root problem and alienate many moderate voters. Defund the police? This will make the police more responsible? The whole thing is a mess with no real solutions in sight.

In my opinion, the problem is the hiring and personnel practices in US police departments. Police officer is a critical job, you must often make snap judgments in tense situations, and you have the power to do violence to others. But police officers are paid similarly to car mechanics, not even as much as many private security guards! The most responsible and wise Americans do not become police officers, they pursue other careers where their talents are better rewarded. Then, if a great person makes it into the police force, there is no way to distinguish themselves by excellent performance and rise quickly through the ranks. The red tape in the personnel system is suffocating. The best officers leave for private opportunities, leaving the police force to make do with the rest.

Given the US political system, where decisions are made based on which simple slogan can rally the crowd, I don't see any hope of this improving. It would take a redesign of the org structure and personnel management of the entire system. Far more likely that leaders make some symbolic, token changes so they can claim to have "done something." The dysfunction of the US government is starting to be noticeable in almost every area...

Paul , Aug 27 2020 18:40 utc | 18

Thanks for this insightful essay and thanks for the last link to the chilling must read essay by Larry Romanoff on the Unz Review. I simply don't know the answer to the multiple problems faced by the US but isn't that the job of the professional politicians? It seems none would even begin to address any of the mind blowing issues raised by Romanoff. In a previous era many of those crucial issues would be career ending third rail, touch and die. Times have been forever changed by events. I have the feeling the general populace won't put up with the present archaic and parasitical structures for long. Hang on for a bumpy ride.

Roy G , Aug 27 2020 18:56 utc | 20

The conclusion is unfortunately correct, but t he sole focus on Antifa as the problem Imo just shows the power of the media and politicians to shape the narrative. Who do you believe is more dangerous, Antifa or White Supremacist militias? The Feds are well aware that WS groups are using the protests to destroy property and trying to set off a race war, but the media and politicians are remarkably silent about the role of White Supremacists in the violence, unless something happens that is too hard to ignore, like 'Umbrella Man.'

https://www.startribune.com/police-umbrella-man-was-a-white-supremacist-trying-to-incite-floyd-rioting/571932272/

Jackrabbit , Aug 27 2020 20:37 utc | 57

pretzelattack @Aug27 20:26 #51

... as for antifa, what exactly have they done? who are they? is there an organization?

My pet theory is that they are an off-shoot of JDL. Ready to turn any legitimate protest into a riot for the evening news. Because Zionists need to protect the Zionist asshats that run USA/Empire.

That's why they're (still) so mysterious. That's why the US government can never seem to understand who they are. Antifa are the domestic "White Helmets" ready to support YOUR protest. Except not.

!!

snake , Aug 27 2020 21:41 utc | 82

the problem is
a. the hiring and personnel practices in US police departments by sabre <= @ 5.
b. the inner economic contradictions arising from secular decline. <= vk @ 7
c. media focus on Antifa <= according to B.
d. events and failures orchestrated to heightened economic oppression <= norecovery @ 21
e. Business as usual while the country burns AU1 @ 34
f. repressive authoritarian state militancy and Trump @ 37..
g. All three shooting victims <= self-defense<= white, <= felons. gm 48
h. A JDL offshoot.. Jackrabbit @ 58

I say the problem of "unsatisfied rising discontent" is to be expected When anyone in a democratic society fails to be heard, by all concerned, little recourse remains to those with a grievance but to ....XXXXX

A very strong constitutional issue exists in these riots =>. The First Amendment <=was not in the Federalist construct of Aristocrats and the corporate empires they owned. The effort to control America is hidden deep inside the words and court interpretations since the Constitution of the United States of America was imposed on Americans.

The Aristocrats in America wanted a British Colonial government without British Aristocrats ; they wanted a government with a strong army so it could protect them from Angry Americans! The Aristocrats and their corporations still in America after Britain was defeated wanted to control the profits that could be made in America, much in the same fashion as the British Colonial Government had helped its corporations, investors, and bankers before the war to control who got the profits that were made in America.

The Federalist wanted a government the Aristocracy could use to exploit America ; the federalist wanted to govern the behaviors and direct the toils of those in America in such a way that only one federal government could do. In fact the so called Framers wanted a royal government, tried to make George Washington, King.

Remember the Declaration of Independence was in 1776 , the America states defeated the British Government in 1778, the Constitution of the USA did not come into being until 1788. During that 10 years John Hanson was the first President of the United States of America.. Samuel Huntington, Thomas McKeeny, and others were President of the United States of America. The British were gone, George Washington was appointed general to remove the British corporations, Investors, and bankers from America, that was accomplished in 1778. The American Aristocrats wanted to own America. George Washington was selected to be the general of the Army because his wealth made him famous enough to attract mercenaries to fight the British at Valley Forge. At the time the Constitution in Philadelphia was developed, George was in Mt. Vernon.

The Aristocratic Convention in Philadelphia, was a meeting, designed to terminate involvement by the newly emancipated American in American politics. The result of the Convention in Philadelphia was a document which outlined how control of America could be returned to the American Aristocrats, a document which would make the Aristrocrat powerful again, the same Aristocrats who had previously used the British Government, to control Americans. Check it out what were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and the like doing in America while America was a British Colony (before 1776)? The Aristocrats wanted a government that would allow America Aristocrats to direct and a government they could use to control Americans.

The anti-federalist tried to refuse ratification of the denial to be against the peoples involvement in their own government but the best the anti-federalist could do against, the strong powers behind the Constitution, was to force the Federalist to add to their regime change Constitution ten basic promises, <=these promises were in the form of amendments and are known as the Bill Of Rights [BOR]: Anyway the first amendment of the BOR reads.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.. But, but but it does not say Congress will make every law necessary to enforce the protection of the first Amendment.

So why can't those who are protesting be allowed to live so they can be heard? Why can't their grievances be listed and placed on the national ballot? Let everyone be heard.. explore every aspect of their concerns and accommodate those with a Grievance to rejoin our democratic society, ask the nation to settle the issues dissenters have ? When the Aristocrats use the government to impose their will on risings, they do so by eliminating bystander awareness and deny everyone but a few to be involved; worse, they allow media to promote, one side of the issue (no must carry rule).. this narrowing of participants happens until nothing remains but conflict between bottom up grievance . . and top down power.. and believe me that is the goal.. to divide and conquer.

[Aug 29, 2020] Is antifa the US variant of White helmets in Syria?

Notable quotes:
"... BLM and Antifa having corporate sponsers makes them a little fascist, too, not to mention ideologically intolerant. The daughtets and sons of the spoiled upper-middle class. ..."
"... he sole focus on Antifa as the problem Imo just shows the power of the media and politicians to shape the narrative. ..."
Aug 29, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jackrabbit , Aug 28 2020 14:43 utc | 213

Bemildred @Aug28 13:53 #202

From your link:


Jason , Aug 28 2020 2:24 utc | 118

@102 Karlof...i agree, your analysis is spot on, but where does a leftist put their political energy when the two options are right-wing fascist and right-wing fascist-lite?

BLM and Antifa having corporate sponsers makes them a little fascist, too, not to mention ideologically intolerant. The daughtets and sons of the spoiled upper-middle class.

I would love a more sharing society, don't know how to get there. USA is probably a lost cause, and as VK states, that is probably a good thing for the rest of the world.

Seneca's Cliff , Aug 27 2020 22:24 utc | 90

Here is something to chew on. I live in portland and the first time I saw Antifa spring up was back in 2009. Rose City Antifa organized a boycott of a local cooperatively owned bike shop. They plastered the town and all the bike racks in the city saying to boycott the worker owned business. What was it's crime you ask?, to get such treatment. The bike shop hosted a meeting and speakers forum held by Portlanders for 911 truth. Draw your own conclusions here.

donten , Aug 27 2020 21:46 utc | 83

What many are doing here, in the heat of battle, is forgetting that this is not a "civil war," it is class war. The ruling class is pursuing its classic tactic of "divide and conquer." Those divided are under the influence of the propaganda of the ruling class, and continue to damage each other, rather than their true enemy the ruling class. This must be made clear, in order to unite the working class, that they may exercise there true power and crush the ruling class. There is no other way.

Roy G , Aug 27 2020 18:56 utc | 20

The conclusion is unfortunately correct, but t he sole focus on Antifa as the problem Imo just shows the power of the media and politicians to shape the narrative. Who do you believe is more dangerous, Antifa or White Supremacist militias? The Feds are well aware that WS groups are using the protests to destroy property and trying to set off a race war, but the media and politicians are remarkably silent about the role of White Supremacists in the violence, unless something happens that is too hard to ignore, like 'Umbrella Man.'

https://www.startribune.com/police-umbrella-man-was-a-white-supremacist-trying-to-incite-floyd-rioting/571932272/

Jackrabbit , Aug 27 2020 20:37 utc | 57

pretzelattack @Aug27 20:26 #51

... as for antifa, what exactly have they done? who are they? is there an organization?

My pet theory is that they are an off-shoot of JDL. Ready to turn any legitimate protest into a riot for the evening news. Because Zionists need to protect the Zionist asshats that run USA/Empire.

That's why they're (still) so mysterious. That's why the US government can never seem to understand who they are. Antifa are the domestic "White Helmets" ready to support YOUR protest. Except not.

!!

Hoyeru , Aug 27 2020 21:27 utc | 76

actually, there is NO such thing as "Antifa". Antifa is as made up as ISIS/Ali Queda is. Antifa is a vague term loosely applied toward a group of people who are fed up with all the fake "Capitalism" and are willing to fight against it.
Some may even not be "Antifa" but fake "Antifa" created for propaganda purposes. Exactly how the notorious "red brigade" in Italy who kidnapped Aldo Moro and killed him. And the Red Brigade was supposed to be Communist also; finny that, since Aldo Moro was about to create a coalition with the Communists and he is prevented from accomplishing that by "Communists".

But b is essentially correct, the average American moron™ is now fed up with all the riots and looting and is siding with trump. But that's only because the Average American moron™ (I have trademarked it, so dont try to steal it) is so stupid, they cannot even think about anything, they live in a very simple good vs bad world.

[Aug 29, 2020] The Police are an crucial part of the neo-liberal system

Notable quotes:
"... The neo-liberal ideology, like many of its predecessor bodies of ideas and alibis for theft, teaches people that poverty is a mark of personal failure and moral turpitude. It also teaches that crime pays and that it is a constant temptation for the poor who, left unregulated, would help themselves to the wealth that members of the ruling class worked so hard for, from the very earliest age, by choosing the right fallopian tubes to crawl into. ..."
"... If such a reaction takes place it will lead to the formation of self defence militias where they are needed on the communities of the poor. And the failure of Biden /Harris would be a positive development in the discrediting of the corrupt "misleadership" class exemplified in the campaign to defeat Sanders and nominate Biden, which was based on the sense, in the Black community, that the Democrats- headed by the author of incarceration laws and one of the most evil prosecutors California has seen in the modern era-are their only protection. ..."
Aug 29, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

bevin , Aug 27 2020 23:21 utc | 99

"...the terrible training and general ineptitude of the police is at the core of the problem."

You are missing the point: the Police are very well trained, and indoctrinated. There is nothing accidental in their behaviour. And the police culture is pretty well internationalised. It is very similar in Canada and the UK for example. And, as we have seen during the past year in France too.

It is a fascistic culture in which racism is an inherited and central but by no means essential part. The Police are an crucial part of the neo-liberal system. And part of the reward they get for doing as they are told, busting strikes, kettling demonstrators, terrorising poor neighbourhoods and protecting private property, is a loose rein: they can do more or less anything that they want. No Judge will do more than slap their wrists, the Juries will thank them for their service. For certain personalities, in which US culture is richly endowed, the right to run wild as part of the biggest biker gang in the world, is a marvellous reward.

They are not only heavily armed but recruited, in large measure from the imperial armed forces; there is nothing like a tour of duty in Afghanistan or Iraq to demonstrate impunity in action.

The cops are the iron fist in the class system, defended by the judiciary, the legislatures and the broad ideological apparatus, from the media to the educational system. And backed up by armed and civilian militias, in most of which off duty cops and 'veterans' of imperial adventures play leading roles. The police stations are gang headquarters in which violence and contempt for democracy and legality are celebrated. And bullying is the secret to success and advancement.

To put the matter in perspective- cops shoot about 1000 US civilians a year, about 25 a week. And most of them are poor people, a constituency in which Black people are over represented after centuries of discrimination and exploitation regimes enforced by violence.

The neo-liberal ideology, like many of its predecessor bodies of ideas and alibis for theft, teaches people that poverty is a mark of personal failure and moral turpitude. It also teaches that crime pays and that it is a constant temptation for the poor who, left unregulated, would help themselves to the wealth that members of the ruling class worked so hard for, from the very earliest age, by choosing the right fallopian tubes to crawl into.

It may be that b is right in his analysis. But it is also possible that-given the stark nature of the facts surrounding these cases- public opinion will recognise that the one constant in all these problems is the police system and the Gulags for private profit which not only dwarf anything the Soviet Union ever developed, in terms of numbers, but in terms of licence, unregulated violence and disregard for natural law hark back to the worst days of the plantation culture.

If such a reaction takes place it will lead to the formation of self defence militias where they are needed on the communities of the poor. And the failure of Biden /Harris would be a positive development in the discrediting of the corrupt "misleadership" class exemplified in the campaign to defeat Sanders and nominate Biden, which was based on the sense, in the Black community, that the Democrats- headed by the author of incarceration laws and one of the most evil prosecutors California has seen in the modern era-are their only protection.

.... ... ...

psychohistorian , Aug 28 2020 15:12 utc | 220

I agree with whoever wrote that it come down to culture.

The culture in the US and the West are the the result of the social contract that has finance be a private owned and controlled element. It created the top/bottom class structure which has been glossed over with left/right brainwashing.

The elite have manufactured the ignorance underpinning the misdirected protesting we are seeing and all the "undesirables" who have been created by the system of inequality of opportunity. The manufacturing of ignorance is called agnotology and came out of the study of the decades long propaganda by the nicotine industry about cancer......are we sure, we are sure, we are sure, we are sure that smoking causes cancer?

There are a few of us out here saying that private banking causes the culture you are seeing in America and China is showing the way with purely sovereign central banking and finance. We see the rest of you as victims of agnotology.

[Aug 27, 2020] Rand Paul Delivers Blistering Foreign Policy Attack- -Biden Will Choose War Again- -

Aug 27, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Among the most notable highlights at last night's Republican National Convention, Senator Rand Paul delivered a blistering take down of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's foreign policy, which Paul linked to multiple wars under Democrat administrations spanning decades (going back to Clinton's bombing of Serbia).

"I fear Biden will choose war again," Paul asserted . "He supported war in Serbia, Syria, Libya. Joe Biden will continue to spill our blood and treasure. President Trump will bring our heroes home."

"If you hate war like I hate war, if you want us to quit sending $50 billion every year to Afghanistan to build their roads and bridges instead of building them here at home , you need to support President Trump for another term," said Paul, who has long been a fierce critic of former President Obama's foreign policy, including overt intervention in Libya, and covert action toward destabilizing Syria.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1298426809290285057

He slammed Biden as a hawk who has "consistently called for more war" and with no signs anything would be different.

Interestingly, Sen. Paul has also in the recent past led foreign policy push back against President Trump - especially over the two times Trump has bombed Syria following alleged Assad chemical attacks, which Paul along with other anti-interventionists across the aisle like Tulsi Gabbard questioned to begin with.

But it appears Paul is firmly supportive of Trump's newly released 50-point agenda for his second term outlining the Commander-in-Chief will "stop endless war" and ultimately bring US troops "home." The plan still emphasized, however, the administration will "maintain" US military strength abroad while 'wiping' out global terrorism.

"President Trump is the first president in a generation to seek to end war rather than start one. He intends to end the war in Afghanistan. He is bringing our men and women home. Compare President Trump with the disastrous record of Joe Biden, who has consistently called for more war ," Paul said further.

Back during the primaries in 2016, Paul and Trump sparred intensely over national security questions:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1298422787120361472

He also highlighted Biden's unrepentant yes vote to go to war in Iraq .

"I'm supporting President Trump because he believes as I do that a strong America cannot fight endless wars. We must not continue to leave our blood and treasure in Middle East quagmires," Paul concluded.

Elsewhere in the approximately four-minute speech, Paul said Trump will fight "socialists poisoning our schools and burning our cities."


Cluster_Frak , 7 hours ago

Obama was a warmonger and so is Biden. They love war and doing everything possible for the next war to be on the home ground.

Davidduke2000 , 7 hours ago

Obama had skeletons in his closet, he did what the neocons want, Trump gave them the embassy and other shenanigans.

Izzy Dunne , 2 hours ago

And so is Trump. They are all warmongers, because war is what the US does...

Weihan , 7 hours ago

Paul is right.

Biden knows who butters his bread. At least candidate Trump - in principle - stood for opposition to the deep state's monstrous agenda.

Biden, Clinton, Bush, Obama are despicable warmongers. Their administrations were responsible for the slaughter of tens of thousands in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and the list would have gone on and on had it not been for Trump.


Remember Biden's 1992 Wall Street Journal article titled:

"How I Learned to Love the New World Order."

JUICE E SMALL IT EMPIRE , 7 hours ago

Rand was the only guy I watched last night and he was on point. I did not disagree with anything he said.

kulkarniravi , 8/26/2020, 2:33:07 PM

You can diss Obama all you want, but he signed a peace accord with Iran and Trump reneged on it. Iran is not the villain, at least not when compared to the likes of Saudi Arabia. And what's the deal with Cuba?

d_7878 , 6 hours ago

Rand on Trump:

"Are we going to fix the country through bombast and empty blather?

"Unless someone points out the emperor has no clothes, they will continue to strut about, and then we'll end up with a reality TV star as our nominee."

"Donald Trump is a delusional narcissist and an orange-faced windbag"

"Have you ever had a speck of dirt fly into your eye?""[It is] annoying, irritating and might even make you cry.

"If the dirt doesn't go away, it will keep scratching your cornea until eventually it blinds you with all its filth. A speck of dirt is way more qualified to be president."

Trump is a "fake conservative."

mike_1010 , 7 hours ago

Trump might be talking peace, but he has increased US military spending significantly more than previous presidents. He also tore up the US peace agreement with Iran and nearly triggered a US war with Iran by assassinating one of their top generals.

If any president is going to start a war with Iran, then it's Trump. And such a war would dwarf any recent wars USA has fought. Because Iran is three times bigger than Iraq in terms of their population, and they've been preparing for a possible US attack for decades.

Perhaps Biden might start a small war here or there. But Trump goes big on anything he does. If he starts a war, then it's going to be either with China or Iran.

So, neither Biden nor Trump is to be trusted, when it comes to war. But I'd say that Trump is the bigger danger compared to Biden. Because if Trump starts a war, then it might end up being a nuclear war.

Airstrip1 , 6 hours ago

Rand Paul needs to ask himself if the pot is blacker than the kettle.

How can he expect people to believe this disingenuous claptrap ?

The USA is an Empire-building Crime Cartel.

Dims or Reps are just frontmen managers for the Mob.

chopsuey , 7 hours ago

Ron and Rand. The dog and pony show. The alternative. They say what you want to hear.

I say

Phuck OFF Ron and Rand. You had many many years to do something (anything) about the endless "wars" and in reality, they are not really wars. They are ruthless invasions of vulnerable countries whereupon natural resources are contained, the culture and its symbolic treasures are destroyed/stolen and thousands to millions are killed in the name of USA. These unwarranted invasions are justified with lies and fraud and deceit.

Washington DC is the military capital of the world doing the dirty work of the elite. And its soldier are your kids and grandkids.

Wake the Phuck UP people. It will not end until they have achieved their objectives. You are fodder for their cannon.

Dragonlord , 7 hours ago

Biden voted for war in Iraq and supported Obama aggression in Libya, Syria, etc and he is disappointed that Trump did not help Kurd to wage war against Turks for their independence.

ConanTheContrarian1 , 7 hours ago

Not sure. Trump has to play ball with established Deep State interests while he tries (I hope) to set things right. So, yes, questions will abound for some time.

takefive , 7 hours ago

whatever the reason, he is now part of the swamp. and that's why he's in a tough re-election battle with a stiff.

Ex-Oligarch , 3 hours ago

You have it exactly wrong. If Trump were really part of the swamp, they wouldn't be fighting so desperately to prevent his re-election. They wouldn't have spent three years on the Russiagate failed coup, they wouldn't have gone through the ridiculous partisan impeachment exercise, they wouldn't have torpedoed the economy over coronavirus, and we wouldn't have organized race riots in all the democrat strongholds.

LaugherNYC , 3 hours ago

Rand Paul is just about the only grown-up in American politics.

How much bettter off would the USA be with a Paul/Gabbard ticket?

But ANYTHING is better than Joe Biden. Literally ANYTHING.

Well...assuming Hillary were dead or incapacitated,

DaVinciCode , 7 hours ago

It's happening. Yugoslavian girl give dire warning to Americans.

This all happened in her country the same way.

PLEASE LISTEN - it is coming to the USA and the West

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-DSjSEl_CM

(copied from a fellow :-) thanks)

captain noob , 7 hours ago

No

synthetically derived , 5 hours ago

I agree with the Yugoslav girl's premise that the powers that be have been deceptively employing a divide-and-conquer strategy to get the American people to fight among themselves rather than confront their own corrupt government, but I do not buy into the conclusion drawn that the solution lies in trusting the head of the government (in this case Trump) to do right by the people.

As George Carlin famously said, "it's a big club, and you ain't in it!" The American people are not going to be able to fix the problems now confronting them by voting for one uniparty politician over another any more than the Yugoslav people were

wick7 , 7 hours ago

The Democrats will get their regime change war no matter what. If Biden is elected they'll continue the Syrian war that has cost 800,000 innocent lives so far. If Trump is elected they'll try to have one here to take him down.

yojimbo , 7 hours ago

Afghani GDP - $20bn. US military spending - $50bn.

They must have the best services in the world!

yesnomaybe , 7 hours ago

That video clip from the 2016 GOP debate is classic... as Paul questions Trump attacking personal appearances, Trump flat out denies it, and then proceeds to do just that in his next breath.

In all seriousness, Rand is a stand up guy and would make a great president.

Maghreb2 , 7 hours ago

Ru Paul has as much chance of stopping this war as Rand Paul. If he was a threat to the people starting it he would be getting the **** bashed out of him or shot dead by a mad man. Don't see many people talking about auditing the Fed outside of Texas anymore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Congressional_baseball_shooting

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/politics/rand-paul-attack.html

He's got a point. Biden's son is in Ukraine milking it high on crack cocaine like a senators son should in the new Roman Emperor. Ukrainian color revolution and CIA long war strategy means he has set up shop there permanently like a little princeling. Same as princess Kushners wonderful tour of the Middle Eastern courts to meet his boyfriends. Old days they would both have be poisoned to death or strangled as children for disrespecting the senate.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/08/will-hunter-biden-jeopardize-his-fathers-campaign

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/20/politics/kushner-uae-israel-f-35-fighter-jet/index.html

Real rules of Eastern European politics are Nationalist winding up dead in dust bins behind the American Embassy and Russians threatening to switch of the gas and freeze everyone to death every winter. Footage of hard man dictator Lukashenko showing up at opposition protests with an assault rifle is broadcast to school children. I'd like to see Hunter Biden and Jared Kushner show up to something like that.

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2020/08/24/belarus-protests-lukashenko-rifle-fred-pleitgen-live-nr-intl-ldn-vpx.cnn

Truth is Trump is a ******* liar. the Moment they started to shut down Rammenstein airbase they moved forces close to the Belarus border to pull another color revolution right in front of Putin. Trump and the Republicans are just stooges for the Zionist mafia. They are playing war scare but its too piss take for anyone now. Polish and Baltic States are NATO and have their own prerogative. They just push people closer to war.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFKyYOZjFzc

Rand Paul should worry about the Civil War that should come after the election.

Aint no senators sons for that game....

DEDA CVETKO , 5 hours ago

Thank you, Rand, for remembering the little Serbia -- twice (in both World Wars) America's fiercest and most loyal ally, and now a roadkill of the Clinton Foundation and Madeleine Albright, the new owner of Kosovo.

The nations that sadistically massacre and dismember their friends and allies do not have a future, nor the right to claim any.

Scipio Africanuz , 5 hours ago

Again Senator Paul, we don't do self deception..

In almost four years, how many legions have been repatriated home, or how many of the existing wars have been ended?

All we've observed, is an escalation of hybrid wars, reducing in some, kinetism, and increasing death tolls via other means, and in some, increased covert kinetism..

Your candidate brazenly murdered a top general of a nation not at war with the US..

Imagine Senator Paul, if Iran had murdered Petraeus, would the US not have declared war?

That the Iranians didn't significantly escalate, was NOT due to fear, but back channel advocacy and energetic remonstrations by adult folks..

If you believe Biden is worse than your candidate who's done worse, in terms of brazen law abrogation, then why aren't you a candidate, or is it that you'd prefer partisanship to patriotism?

Look within your party for corollary and accomplice warmongers, and leave Biden alone after all, you do have a rabid warmongering Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton as party colleagues, no?

Senator Paul, there's principle, character, and integrity and then there's opportunism, partisanship, and betrayal..

Of nobility..

Anyhow, you're sovereign and thus, fully entitled to your choices, we simply point out inconsistencies between what you espouse, and what you support..

Character, Senator Paul, is destiny..

Cheers...

Anthraxed , 4 hours ago

Trump has dropped more bombs than Obama at the same time in his term.

You're in complete denial if you think Trump has stopped any of the wars. And yes, he is expanding the wars to a much larger country.

Trump's first veto was a bill that would have stopped the Yemen war.

Reality is like Cryptonite for Trumptards.

quanttech , 4 hours ago

lol, 10 minutes ago I was being accused of being Antifa, and now I'm a Trumptard. Definitely doing something right.

Yes, Trump is a war criminal extraordinaire. He dropped a MOAB. He removed controls on civilian casualties. He dropped 7400+ bombs on Afghanistan in 2019.... 60% of the casualties were civilians, mostly children.

He also stupidly listened to his generals when they told him to kill Sulemani. BUT... when the Iranians retaliated (and they DID retaliate, injuring dozens of US soldiers) Trump de-escalated. Similarly, when the Iranians downed a drone, the generals wanted to retaliate - Trump asked how many Iranians would die. The generals said 150. Trump said it didn't make sense to kill 150 people for downing a drone.

Trump is a moron who is completely out of it most of the time. But when he pays attention for a moment, he's against a a war with Iran.

Now, if I'm a Trumptard, then you're a Hillaryhead. My question to you is... where would we be if Hillary was president? Answer: at war with Iran. Another question: where will we be if Biden is president?

Dull Care , 3 hours ago

How much authority do you think Trump has over the foreign policy? Not a rhetorical question but I have yet to see an American president run for office advocating a more interventionist foreign policy yet it doesn't change greatly no matter who is in office. Trump often carries a big stick but he's nowhere near as reckless as his predecessors.

The one thing we know is Trump is hostile to the Chinese government and hasn't turned around relations with Russia.

quanttech , 1 hour ago

"... I have this feeling that whoever's elected president when you win, you go into this smoky room with the twelve industrialists capitalists scum-***** who got you in there. And a big guy with a cigar goes: 'Roll the film.' And it's a shot of the Kennedy Assassination from an angle you've never seen before - It looks suspiciously off the grassy knoll. Then the screen comes up, and they go to the new president: 'Any questions?'"
- Bill Hicks, Rant in E-Minor (1993)

Observer 2020 , 5 hours ago

The spiritual, moral, ethical, philosophical, intellectual and cultural bankruptcy of Biden and his fellow death cult reprobates is depthless. One need know nothing more about them that they have become so detached from reality as to regard abortion, partial birth abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, generational genocide, genocide, of the white race, unremitting sociocultural warfare and the balkanization of this nation as being virtues.

Anyone who would even begin to contemplate supporting Biden or any of his fellow Fifth Columnists should be regarded as being too demented or otherwise Bidenesque to be competent to vote.

12Doberman , 5 hours ago

Biden has a record showing him to be a Neocon...and that's why we see the neverTrumpers supporting him.

Musum , 5 hours ago

And Pompeous is 10X worse than Biden. And he serves as Trump's Sec. of State.

chinoslims , 5 hours ago

Hey Trump is self professed king of Israel

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/08/donald-trump-king-of-israel

Musum , 5 hours ago

Of course, he's just a viceroy serving on behalf of the kosher people.

ted41776 , 8 hours ago

it's not what the president chooses

it's what chooses the president

conraddobler , 8 hours ago

This has lost all it's entertainment value.

Hollywood and the Postman was a more realistic view, in that movie I believe the warlord was a former copier either salesman or technician, can't remember but it's more likely a guy like that would have leadership capabilities than these clowns would.

invention13 , 1 hour ago

It saddens me that people can just go about their business in this country without giving a thought about the men and women who are getting injured and coming home stressed out and addicted to painkillers. Also that the real motive for continued military involvement in the ME is that some people are making tons of money off it. We need our own version of Smedley Butler these days.

It is all decadent beyond belief.

mrjinx007 , 1 hour ago

That MF no good SOB war mongering no good neocon SOB Shawn did everything he could to get RP to agree with him that we need to continue with the policy of regime change.

Rand just basically told him to shut the f up and stop blowing the Neo-cons' erections. It was precious. You know how people like this ******* Hannity get their funding from. Deep state, MIC, and all the f'king Rino's like Tommy Cotton.

gm_general , 2 hours ago

Thanks to Hillary and Obama, Libya is a complete mess and black people are being sold as slaves there. Let that sink in.

[Aug 24, 2020] The country is already a soft military dictatorship, in my opinion, because of all the wars and belligerence plus the undeniable fact that DOD and HUD have stolen $21 Trillion

Aug 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

RoatanBill , says: August 23, 2020 at 8:25 pm GMT

@HarvardSqEddy pinion, because of all the wars and belligerence plus the undeniable fact that DOD and HUD have stolen $21 Trillion ( https://missingmoney.solari.com/ ) in recent decades and there's no recognition of this fact on the evening news and there are no congressional hearings to find out where that currency went. That tells me the figureheads in the visible gov't are just actors and they aren't interested because they were told to ignore it.

What comes out the other end, according to what they want, is a much lower standard of living for the masses, a much reduced population and much more corporate/fascist control. Think North Korea.

[Aug 24, 2020] It is the middle level of educated executives, lawyers, accountants and managers in government, criminal corporations, Foundations, think tanks, the media, and so many others, who are directly responsible for knowingly inflicting the vast damage on their own people and nation

Aug 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

Tommy Thompson , says: August 24, 2020 at 9:00 am GMT

Wow. a very precise shot at America's most underlying problem:

These individuals are vital for the success of the transformation of the US to a fascist state, with the elites dependent upon them to execute their policies, yet they also profit from their positions in terms of attractive salaries and protection from much of the law . These are the people who best know of all the crimes and social injustices, being in fact a willing part of their execution process, but least likely to blow the whistle for fear of damaging their careers.

It is the middle level of educated executives, lawyers, accountants and managers in government, criminal corporations, Foundations, think tanks, the media, and so many others, who are directly responsible for knowingly inflicting the vast damage on their own people and nation

A very illuminating description of modern day America, no punches pulled by Larry Romanoff.

Justsaying , says: August 24, 2020 at 10:12 am GMT

Another fact goes unmentioned: the US has the largest number of unindicted war criminals in the post-WW II world, a fact that allows for an escalation of war crimes committed. For those here who refuse to accept the racist nature of our country, they need only look at the ethnic makeup of the millions of victims of our unprovoked foreign wars of aggression.

[Aug 21, 2020] The CIA Versus The Kennedys

Aug 20, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Jacob Hornberger via The Future of Freedom Foundation,

Former Congressman Ron Paul and his colleague Dan McAdams recently conducted a fascinating interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which focused in part on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who was Kennedy Jr.'s uncle. The interview took place on their program the Ron Paul Liberty Report.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/_kJdOtnBUcw

Owing to the many federal records that have been released over the years relating to the Kennedy assassination, especially through the efforts of the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s, many Americans are now aware of the war that was being waged between President Kennedy and the CIA throughout his presidency . The details of this war are set forth in FFF's book JFK's War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne.

me title=

In the interview, Robert Kennedy Jr. revealed a fascinating aspect of this war with which I was unfamiliar. He stated that the deep animosity that the CIA had for the Kennedy family actually stretched back to something the family patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, did in the 1950s that incurred the wrath of Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA.

Kennedy Jr. stated that his grandfather, Joseph P. Kennedy, had served on a commission that was charged with examining and analyzing CIA covert activities, or "dirty tricks" as Kennedy Jr. put them. As part of that commission, Kennedy Jr stated, Joseph Kennedy (John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy's father) had determined that the CIA had done bad things with its regime-change operations that were destroying democracies, such as in Iran and Guatemala.

Consequently, Joseph Kennedy recommended that the CIA's power to engage in covert activities be terminated and that the CIA be strictly limited to collecting intelligence and empowered to do nothing else.

According to Kennedy Jr.,

"Allen Dulles never forgave him -- never forgave my family -- for that."

about:blank

about:blank

me title=

I wasn't aware of that fact.

I assumed that the war between President Kennedy and the CIA had begun with the CIA's invasion at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. The additional information added by Kennedy Jr. places things in a much more fascinating and revealing context.

Upon doing a bit of research on the Internet, I found that the commission that Kennedy Jr. must have been referring to was the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, which President Eisenhower had established in 1956 through Executive Order 10656 . Eisenhower appointed Joseph Kennedy to serve on that commission.

That year was three years after the CIA's 1953 regime change operation in Iran which destroyed that country's democratic system. It was two years after the CIA's regime-change operation in Guatemala that destroyed that country's democratic system.

Keep in mind that the ostensible reason that the CIA engaged in these regime-change operations was to protect "national security," which over time has become the most important term in the American political lexicon. Although no one has ever come up with an objective definition for the term, the CIA's power to address threats to "national security," including through coups and assassinations, became omnipotent.

Yet, here was Joseph P. Kennedy declaring that the CIA's power to exercise such powers should be terminated and recommending that the CIA's power be strictly limited to intelligence gathering.

It is not difficult to imagine how livid CIA Director Dulles and his cohorts must have been at Kennedy. No bureaucrat likes to have his power limited. More important, for Dulles and his cohorts, it would have been clear that if Kennedy got his way, "national security" would be gravely threatened given the Cold War that the United States was engaged in with the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea, and other communist nations.

Now consider what happened with the Bay of Pigs. The CIA's plan for a regime-change invasion of Cuba, was conceived under President Eisenhower. Believing that Vice President Nixon would be elected president in 1960, the CIA was quite surprised that Kennedy was elected instead. To ensure that the invasion would go forth anyway, the CIA assured Kennedy that the invasion would succeed without U.S. air support. It was a lie. The CIA assumed that once the invasion was going to go down in defeat at the hands of the communists, Kennedy would have to provide the air support in order to "save face."

But Kennedy refused to be played by the CIA. When the CIA's army of Cuban exiles was going down in defeat, the CIA requested the air support, convinced that their plan to manipulate the new president would work. It didn't. Kennedy refused to provide the air support and the CIA's invasion went down in defeat.

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Now consider what happened after the Bay of Pigs: Knowing that the CIA had played him and double-crossed him, John Kennedy fired Allen Dulles as CIA director, along with his chief deputy, Charles Cabell. He then put his younger brother Bobby Kennedy in charge of monitoring the CIA, which infuriated the CIA.

Now jump ahead to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which Kennedy resolved by promising that the United States would not invade Cuba for a regime-change operation. That necessarily would leave a permanent communist regime in Cuba, something that the CIA steadfastly maintained was a grave threat to "national security" -- a much bigger threat, in fact, than the threats supposedly posed by the regimes in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954.

And then Kennedy did the unforgivable, at least insofar as the CIA was concerned . In his famous Peace Speech at American University in June 1963, he declared an end to the entire Cold War and announced that the United States was going to establish friendly and peaceful relations with the communist world.

Kennedy had thrown the gauntlet down in front of the CIA. It was either going to be his way or the CIA's way. There was no room for compromise, and both sides knew it.

In the minds of former CIA Director Allen Dulles and the people still at the CIA, what Kennedy was doing was anathema and, even worse, the gravest threat to "national security" the United States had ever faced, a much bigger threat than even that posed by the democratic regimes in Iran and Guatemala. At that point, the CIA's animosity toward President Kennedy far exceeded the animosity it had borne toward his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, several years before.



Joe A , 2 hours ago

And Allen Dulles, the CIA director that Kennedy fired, was on the Warren Commission that concluded that Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin who was a poor marksman using a crappy rifle.

USGrant , 2 hours ago

The Warren Commission exhibits show that the Carcano after the scope was shimmed to make it usable, shot about 10 inches to the right and high at 25 yards with terrible accuracy. Presumably this was one of the carbines whose barrel was cut down from rifle length taking much of the progressive rifling with it. The cartridges placed on the 6th floor were clearly reloads not the supposed new Western cartridges of circa 1953. As reloads then the question arises where were .267 bullets to be obtained since only .264 were manufactured at the time which would make accuracy suffer.

Joe A , 1 hour ago

Yes, but these bullets were magic bullets according to the Warren Commission. There was one bullet that entered Kennedy's throat and left it, then traversed through air, changing course, hanged suspended in mid air for about a second or so and then continued to hit the governor that was sitting in front to the left of Kennedy. That bullet traversed 15 layers of clothing, seven layers of skin, and approximately 15 inches of muscle tissue, struck a necktie knot, removed 4 inches of rib, and shattered a radius bone and was found virtually intact. Some bullet!

USGrant , 1 hour ago

And the found bullet changed from a spitzer according to the first hospital worker who was alerted to it, to a round nose.

WingedMessenger , 19 minutes ago

You have missed several TV episodes that have successfully recreated the magic bullet scenario, including Myth Busters. The bullet is not magic, the actual seating geometry and sight line of the shooter all contribute to the bullet path being actually very straight. The 6.5mm 150-160 grain bullets have a very high sectional density that gives them a lot of penetration. In one test the spent bullet was found resting on the leg of the second ("John Connally") dummy just like it did in real life.

They used the same Cacarno rifle for the tests. The shot is not difficult. The car is moving directly away from the shooter at the time of this shot, so no real lead is required. The range is less than a 100 yards so you just aim dead on and shoot. Hunters do it all the time.

ThirteenthFloor , 1 hour ago

When Allen Dulles passed away, the CIA sent someone to Dulles' Georgetown home to get 'missing' and incriminating JFK autopsy photos from his safe and destroy them. That person was James Jesus Angleton, who admitted late in his life. Read last chapter in "Devils Chessboard" - David Talbot.

USGrant , 1 hour ago

If I recall, he was the one found searching in her studio for Mary Pinchot Meyer's diary after she was killed . (Cord Meyer's ex-wife)

cornflakesdisease , 10 minutes ago

He also had a huge hand in the political beginings of the UN.

Bay of Pigs , 2 hours ago

Allen Dulles, LBJ and the CIA murdered JFK. It's that fu#king simple.

MontCar , 1 hour ago

LBJ likely abetted the cover up. Placing Allen Dulles, recently fired from the CIA directorship by JFK, on the since disgraced Warren Commission. Mossad may have partnered with CIA in the assassination. JFK evidently opposed Israel's nuclear weapons acquisition efforts - an existential issue for Israel. Clear motive.

USGrant , 1 hour ago

Allan Dulles then danced on JFK's grave.

Angular Momentum , 1 hour ago

Kennedy also supported the right of return for the Palestinians refugees who left Israel for Jordan. Also an existential issue for Israel. I think in Ben Gurian's mind either Kennedy lived or Israel survived as a Jewish state. It was one or the other. I have no doubt the CIA covered for Israel because they had their own beef with Kennedy.

Yen Cross , 1 hour ago

It wasn't some flunkie Soviet reject from the bell tower.

There's no way Oswald could bounce a high velocity round of lead off a light post, in front of the Limousine, still carrying enough muzzle velocity to cave in the back side of POTUS cranium.

There were other players, at the very least.

WingedMessenger , 5 minutes ago

I have been to the 6th floor museum in Dallas several times and reviewed the various theories on where other shooters might have been located. All of the them are worse than the 6th floor of the Book Depository. Some are down right stupid, like the one supposed in the sewer by the curb. It would be impossible to shoot a rifle in there at the angle needed to hit above the wheel well of the limo, much less be able to see the limo before it was right on you. You could not even see Kennedy from there, You would have to shoot through the bottom of a door or the floor boards just to hit him in the leg or foot.

The 6th floor is the only location that allows the shooter to see the limos coming before they arrive in the target zone and allow him to prepare to shoot. All the other locations give only a tiny window to ID the target and loose off a round before the limo disappears out of view. A competent assassin would have chosen the 6th floor window. If Oswald was not the best shot, there is always the possibility that he just got lucky on some easy shots, or maybe someone else was in the 6th floor window. We don't have any evidence for either case.

NewDarwin , 3 hours ago

The CIA has it in for anyone who tries to dismantle the deep state...

sj warrior , 2 hours ago

jfk tried to stop izzy from getting nuclear bombs

rfk tried to force the forerunner to aipac to register as foreign agent, thus subject to gov monitoring

both of these stances failed after the assassinations

Pandelis , 26 minutes ago

plus the Secret Societies speech ... that was a biggie showing he was into them (cia was just one of octopus arms)....

https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/american-newspaper-publishers-association-19610427

Pandelis , 23 minutes ago

and the executive order issued by Kennedy on using silver as currency ... that was really going after the owners ... in all fairness, not sure he knew what he was up against ... his son was killed without giving him a chance to shine yet ...

desertboy , 2 hours ago

The CIA is the direct product of, and works directly for, the same parties that own the Fed (the primary shareholders of its shareholders).

The CIA is even typically headed by bankers.

This is simply the history.

eatapeach , 2 hours ago

Nope, Trump is an insider. Should be pretty obvious given his behavior toward Syria, Iran, and Israel. He's no different than all those in the long line since after Kennedy.

Dzerzhhinsky , 2 hours ago

The CIA Versus The Kennedys

We all know who won that fight. Not a single American President has dared to disobey the CIA since.

revjimbeam , 2 hours ago

Nixon ended Viet nam and opened China- liddy(FBI) and hunt(CIA) set the administration up by breaking into the watergate then finished him of with anonymous leaks to the Washington post by felt (deepthroat) the no.2 at fbi....sound familar?

Impeachment doesn't leave agency fingerprints and is less messy than Dallas Memphis and LA

Gospel According To Me , 2 hours ago

Interesting theory and very plausible.

That is why to this day the Deep State poses such a grave danger to our democracy. They want Trump out of their way, period. If Trump pardons Snowden he better head for his WH bomb shelter. They will really go after him with everything they have. And they still have plenty of sick like-minded people in place in every agency. They spy on Trump and work to sabotage every good idea he has to Make America Great Again. Pray he prevails and the USA survives.

eatapeach , 2 hours ago

Please. Snowden is a feeble US analog of Baryshnikov et al and Russia knows it. Moreover, the contrived Trump v. Deep State narrative reads like a Hardy Boys novel, soft and weak. If 'deep state' wants someone gone, they don't dilly dally. What are you, 13 years old?

2hangmen , 2 hours ago

Well, that explains the CIA involvement with the Deep State in trying to take down candidate Trump, then President Trump. Whether someone can bring them into line will determine if we keep our nation as founded.

ComradePuff , 22 minutes ago

Kennedy didn't even make one full term, let alone stand for re-election. In the meantime, the CIA has only gotten stronger and spun off into a dozen other agencies. You're deluding yourself.

FlKeysFisherman , 2 hours ago

WTF, I like a Kennedy now!!!

Earth Ling , 2 hours ago

Then you'll love this!

RFK JR's org Children's Health Defense is suing Zuckerberg and Facebook:

CHD Holds Press Conference with Legal Team and Plaintiff in Lawsuit Against Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and Three of Facebook's So-Called "Fact-Checkers"

ComradePuff , 13 minutes ago

I fear for RFK Jr, to be perfectly honest. It's amazing he can even walk with balls that big.

Eastern Whale , 2 hours ago

shows that politicians are all rotten to the core even in a "democratically" elected government

communism in 20th century is a joke, Oligarch from Russia is buying soccer teams in UK, Chinese is lined up at Chanel and LV in every city. communism is just a concept and name now.

anyhow, all politicians should be at the bottom of the ocean

presterjohn1198 , 2 hours ago

The cia has always been the shadow government of the USSA. Those clever Ivy League boys think that they always knew better about screwing up world affairs than our elected government. Pretty much the same kind of club as the legacy media, whom the cia frequently collaborates with.
Fools!

Arising , 1 hour ago

... the CIA's 1953 regime change operation in Iran which destroyed that country's democratic system.

There's one for all the Republican fan boys that hate Iran because their leaders tell them to.

buckboy , 1 hour ago

Pres. Trump are well aware of these facts. Main reason why he has his own private security. Amazing he is getting this far. This man knows how to win than anyone else.

He made Brennan, Clapper, Comey Clintons like real clowns instead.

Call it conspiracy, the terrorism, blm antifa racism and non sense chaos are supported by the cia. CIA is the main and most dangerous enemy of the world. To control is the main objective.

Like the JFK family and now Trump, if you are against them, they'll discredit you through the history.

USGrant , 2 hours ago

Listen to Douglas Horne's interview of Dino Brugioni and how the Zupruder film was doctored to make it seem that the head shot came from the back. No surprise with the head movement-it came from the front.

USGrant , 2 hours ago

Those frames were cut out which not only exaggerated the head movement but it made it impossible for 3 shots to come from the crappy Carcano in the shortened time as gauged from the film. So there is only one frame of the head shot but Dino remembered several as he was the one charged with making the briefing board on Saturday night prior to the film being altered on Sunday at the Kodak Hawkeye Works.

Wild Bill Steamcock , 1 hour ago

Richard Dolan has a nice set of interviews with Phillip Lavelle (a walking JFK encyclopedia) on the topic at his youtube channel. ...

Wild Bill Steamcock , 1 hour ago

And Tracey too, being that smart and good looking is almost unfair

fucking truth , 1 hour ago

And yet trump promised and reneged on releasing all the Kennedy docs, it's a big swamp and i think Trump's in it, ribbit.

Wild Bill Steamcock , 1 hour ago

It's like trying to drain an ocean. Eventually you fall in

mcmich , 1 hour ago

The people in power now is the people behind JFK's murder..

Soloamber , 38 minutes ago

So does everyone else . Jackie Kennedy knew too . She said they finally got him . Johnson told his mistress the same day .

DEDA CVETKO , 1 hour ago

The only worthwhile human beings in the entire Kennedy clan were JFK and Jr. (notwithstanding Jackie, whom I count as Onassis). The rest - particularly Bobby Kennedy - were scum of the earth and sycophants of the Matrix, the lowliest kind of elitist wire-carrying police informants and apron-wearers. To this day I don't understand how anyone in the right mind could venerate Bobby Kennedy. The man was three tiers below even his fuhrer-sucking daddy.

Would United States have been better off had Kennedy survived? Probably, but not by much and only in the short term. We might have avoided Vietnam (highly questionable - JFK had already sent our troops there and the whole thing was already on the verge of dangerous escalation). But as soon as his second term ended, the Deep State would have installed a more desirable and obedient puppet (most likely Nixon, possibly LBJ) in the White House and we would have continued where LBJ left off in January 1969.

BTW, it may have been CIA that backstabbed JFK on the Bay of Pigs fiasco, but it was his own baby brother who twisted the knife .

A_Huxley , 3 hours ago

Look back over the National Intelligence Estimates.

NIE 53-63 Prospects In South Vietnam.

National Security Action Memorandum 28.

TahoeBilly2012 , 3 hours ago

Y Cult, Cult of Osiris.....going down!!!!

Soloamber , 41 minutes ago

If they could do the same to Trump they would .

The only thing they have left is massive ballot fraud

which they have every intent of doing .

[Aug 21, 2020] On Bombs And Bombings by Caitlin Johnstone

Notable quotes:
"... The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House. ..."
"... "The US-centralized empire is held together by endless violence, and the plutocrats who run it have built their kingdoms upon the status quo of that empire." That statement is a synopsis of the past 500+ years of European expansion/ imperialism ..."
Aug 19, 2020 | www.informationclearinghouse.info

For a full week now the Israeli army has been bombing Gaza, a population that is about to run out of fuel for its only power plant due to a years-long Israeli program of deliberate siege warfare .

Yesterday the US ordered an airstrike on Syrian forces, killing one, when they refused to let the illegal occupying force past a checkpoint in northern Syria.

In both cases an arm of the US-centralized empire used wildly disproportionate force against people who stood against a hostile occupation of their own country. In both cases the more powerful and violent occupiers claimed they were acting in "self-defense". In both cases dropping explosives from the sky upon human beings barely made the news.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1295478503694114816&lang=en&origin=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.informationclearinghouse.info%2F55476.htm&theme=light&widgetsVersion=223fc1c4%3A1596143124634&width=550px

Bombs should not exist. Explosives designed to blow fire and shrapnel through human bodies should not be a thing. In a sane world, there wouldn't be bombs, and if some mentally unbalanced person ever made and used one it would be a major international news story.

Instead, bombs are cranked out like iPhones at enormous profit , and nearly all bombings are ignored. Many bombs are being dropped per day by the US and its allies, with a massive civilian death toll , and almost none of those bombings receive any international attention. The only time they do is generally when a bombing occurs that was not authorized by the US-centralized empire.

This is one of those absolutely freakish things about our society that has become normalized through careful narrative management, and we really shouldn't allow it to be. The fact that explosives designed to rip apart human anatomy are dropped from the sky many times per day for no other reason than to exert control over foreign countries should horrify us all.

An interesting social experiment when you talk to someone might be to tell them solemnly, "There's been a bombing." Then when they say "What?? Where??", tell them "The Middle East mostly. Our government and its allies drop many bombs there per day in order to keep a resource-rich geostrategic region balkanized and controllable."

Then watch their reaction.

You will probably notice a marked change in demeanor as the person learns that what you meant is different from what they thought you meant. They will likely act as though you'd tricked them in some way. But you didn't. You just called a thing the thing that it is, and let their assumptions do the rest.

When someone gravely tells you "There's been a bombing," what they almost always mean is that there has been a suspected terrorist attack in a western, majority-white nation. They don't mean the kind of bombing that kills exponentially more people and does exponentially more damage than terrorism in western nations. They don't mean the kind of terrorism that our government enacts and approves of.

There's a lot of pushback nowadays against the racism and prejudices that are woven throughout the fabric of our society, and rightly so . But what doesn't get nearly enough attention in this discourse is the fact that while some manifestations of bigotry may have been successfully scaled back somewhat in our own countries, it was in a sense merely exported overseas.

The violence that is being inflicted overseas in our name by the US-centralized empire is more horrific than any manifestation of racism we're ever likely to encounter at home. It is more horrific than the pre-integration American South. It is more horrific than even slavery itself. Yet even the more conscious among us fail to give this relentless onslaught of violence a proportionate degree of recognition and condemnation, even while the consent for it is largely born of the unexamined bigoted notion that violence against people in developing and non-western countries does not matter.

Like many other forms of bigotry, this one has been engineered and promulgated by powerful people who benefit from it. If the mainstream news media were what it purports to be, namely an institution dedicated to creating an informed populace about what's truthfully going on in the world, we would see the bombings in foreign nations given the same type of coverage that a bombing in Paris or London receives.

This would immediately bring consciousness to the unconscious bigotry that those in the US-centralized empire hold against people in low and middle income countries, which is exactly why the plutocrat-owned media do not report on it in this way. The US-centralized empire is held together by endless violence, and the plutocrats who run it have built their kingdoms upon the status quo of that empire.

When people set out to learn what's really going on in their world they often start cramming their heads with history and geopolitics facts and figures, which is of course fine and good. But a bigger part of getting a clear image of what's happening in the world is simply turning your gaze upon things you already kind of knew were happening, but couldn't quite bring yourself to look at.

Caitlin's articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook , following her antics on Twitter , checking out her podcast , throwing some money into her hat on Patreon or Paypal , or buying her book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers . https://caitlinjohnstone.com

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.

From the Ramparts, 17 hours ago

"The US-centralized empire is held together by endless violence, and the plutocrats who run it have built their kingdoms upon the status quo of that empire." That statement is a synopsis of the past 500+ years of European expansion/ imperialism.

The AmeriKKKan Empire is the reigning heir to that legacy of Western thuggery, plunder and pillage.

[Aug 21, 2020] Why Brennan, Strzok, DOJ Needed Julian Assange Arrested; And Why UK Officials Obliged... -

Notable quotes:
"... To understand the risk that Julian Assange represented to CIA interests, it is important to understand just how extensive the operations of the CIA were in 2016. It is within this network of foreign and domestic operations where FBI Agent Peter Strzok is clearly working as a bridge between the CIA and FBI operations. ..."
"... By now people are familiar with the construct of CIA operations involving Joseph Mifsud, the Maltese professor now generally admitted/identified as a western intelligence operative who was tasked by the CIA (John Brennan) to run an operation against Trump campaign official George Papadopoulos in both Italy (Rome) and London. { Go Deep } ..."
"... In a similar fashion the CIA tasked U.S. intelligence asset Stefan Halper to target another Trump campaign official, Carter Page. Under the auspices of being a Cambridge Professor Stefan Halper also targeted General Michael Flynn. Additionally, using assistance from a female FBI agent under the false name Azra Turk, Halper also targeted Papadopoulos . ..."
"... The initial operations to target Flynn, Papadopoulos and Page were all based overseas. This seemingly makes the CIA exploitation of the assets and the targets much easier. ..."
"... In short, Peter Strzok appears to be the very eager, profoundly overzealous James Bond wannabe, who acted as a bridge between the CIA and the FBI. The perfect type of FBI career agent for CIA Director John Brennan to utilize. ..."
"... It was also Fusion-GPS founder Glenn Simpson who was domestically tasked with a Russian lobbyist named Natalia Veselnitskya. A little reported Russian Deputy Attorney General named Saak Albertovich Karapetyan was working double-agents for the CIA and Kremlin. Karapetyan was directing the foreign operations of Natalia Veselnitskaya, and Glenn Simpson was organizing her inside the U.S. ..."
"... All of this context outlines the extent to which the CIA was openly involved in constructing a political operation that settled upon anyone in candidate Donald Trump's orbit. ..."
"... Additionally, Christopher Steele was a British intelligence officer, hired by Fusion-GPS to assemble and launder fraudulent intelligence information within his dossier. And we cannot forget Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch, who was recruited by Asst. FBI Director Andrew McCabe to participate in running an operation against the Trump campaign and create the impression of Russian involvement. Deripaska refused to participate . ..."
"... The key point of all that background is to see how committed the CIA and FBI were to the constructed narrative of Russia interfering with the 2016 election. The CIA, FBI, and by extension the DOJ, put a hell of a lot of work into it. Intelligence community work that Durham is now unraveling. ..."
"... Rohrabacher recounted his conversation with Assange to The Hill. "Our three-hour meeting covered a wide array of issues, including the WikiLeaks exposure of the DNC [Democratic National Committee] emails during last year's presidential election," Rohrabacher said, "Julian emphatically stated that the Russians were not involved in the hacking or disclosure of those emails." ..."
"... Knowing how much effort the CIA and FBI put into the Russia collusion-conspiracy narrative, it would make sense for the FBI to take keen interest after this August 2017 meeting between Rohrabacher and Assange; and why the FBI would quickly gather specific evidence (related to Wikileaks and Bradley Manning) for a grand jury by December 2017. ..."
"... The Weissmann/Mueller report contains claims that Russia hacked the DNC servers as the central element to the Russia interference narrative in the U.S. election. This claim is directly disputed by WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, as outlined during the Dana Rohrabacher interview, and by Julian Assange on-the-record statements. ..."
"... The predicate for Robert Mueller's investigation was specifically due to Russian interference in the 2016 election. The fulcrum for this Russia interference claim is the intelligence community assessment; and the only factual evidence claimed within the ICA is that Russia hacked the DNC servers; a claim only made possible by relying on forensic computer analysis from Crowdstrike, a DNC contractor. ..."
"... The CIA holds a massive conflict of self-interest in upholding the Russian hacking claim. The FBI holds a massive interest in maintaining that claim. All of those foreign countries whose intelligence apparatus participated with Brennan and Strzok also have a vested self-interest in maintaining that Russia hacking and interference narrative. ..."
"... This Russian "hacking" claim is ultimately so important to the CIA, FBI, DOJ, ODNI and U.K intelligence apparatus ..."
Aug 21, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by 'sundance' via TheConservativeTreehouse.com,

According to reports in November of 2019, U.S Attorney John Durham and U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr were spending time on a narrowed focus looking carefully at CIA activity in the 2016 presidential election. One recent quote from a media-voice increasingly sympathetic to a political deep-state notes:

"One British official with knowledge of Barr's wish list presented to London commented that "it is like nothing we have come across before, they are basically asking, in quite robust terms, for help in doing a hatchet job on their own intelligence services"". ( Link )

It is interesting that quote came from a British intelligence official, as there appears to be evidence of an extensive CIA operation that likely involved U.K. intelligence services. In addition, and as a direct outcome, there is an aspect to the CIA operation that overlaps with both a U.S. and U.K. need to keep Wikileaks founder Julian Assange under tight control. In this outline we will explain where corrupt U.S. and U.K. interests merge.

To understand the risk that Julian Assange represented to CIA interests, it is important to understand just how extensive the operations of the CIA were in 2016. It is within this network of foreign and domestic operations where FBI Agent Peter Strzok is clearly working as a bridge between the CIA and FBI operations.

By now people are familiar with the construct of CIA operations involving Joseph Mifsud, the Maltese professor now generally admitted/identified as a western intelligence operative who was tasked by the CIA (John Brennan) to run an operation against Trump campaign official George Papadopoulos in both Italy (Rome) and London. { Go Deep }

In a similar fashion the CIA tasked U.S. intelligence asset Stefan Halper to target another Trump campaign official, Carter Page. Under the auspices of being a Cambridge Professor Stefan Halper also targeted General Michael Flynn. Additionally, using assistance from a female FBI agent under the false name Azra Turk, Halper also targeted Papadopoulos .

The initial operations to target Flynn, Papadopoulos and Page were all based overseas. This seemingly makes the CIA exploitation of the assets and the targets much easier.

One of the more interesting aspects to the Durham probe is a possibility of a paper-trail created as a result of the tasking operations. We should watch closely for more evidence of a paper trail as some congressional reps have hinted toward documented evidence (transcripts, recordings, reports) that are exculpatory to the targets (Page & Papadop). HPSCI Ranking Member Devin Nunes has strongly hinted that very specific exculpatory evidence was known to the FBI and yet withheld from the FISA application used against Carter Page that also mentions George Papadopoulos. I digress

However, there is an aspect to the domestic U.S. operation that also bears the fingerprints of the CIA; only this time due to the restrictive laws on targets inside the U.S. the CIA aspect is less prominent. This is where FBI Agent Peter Strzok working for both agencies starts to become important.

Remember, it's clear in the text messages Strzok has a working relationship with what he called their "sister agency", the CIA. Additionally, Brennan has admitted Strzok helped write the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) which outlines the Russia narrative; and it is almost guaranteed the July 31st, 2016, "Electronic Communication" from the CIA to the FBI that originated FBI operation "Crossfire Hurricane" was co-authored from the CIA by Strzok . and Strzok immediately used that EC to travel to London to debrief intelligence officials around Australian Ambassador to the U.K. Alexander Downer.

In short, Peter Strzok appears to be the very eager, profoundly overzealous James Bond wannabe, who acted as a bridge between the CIA and the FBI. The perfect type of FBI career agent for CIA Director John Brennan to utilize.

Fusion-GPS founder Glenn Simpson hired CIA Open Source analyst Nellie Ohr toward the end of 2015 ; at appropriately the same time as " FBI Contractors " were identified exploiting the NSA database and extracting information on a specific set of U.S. persons.

It was also Fusion-GPS founder Glenn Simpson who was domestically tasked with a Russian lobbyist named Natalia Veselnitskya. A little reported Russian Deputy Attorney General named Saak Albertovich Karapetyan was working double-agents for the CIA and Kremlin. Karapetyan was directing the foreign operations of Natalia Veselnitskaya, and Glenn Simpson was organizing her inside the U.S.

Glenn Simpson managed Veselnitskaya through the 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr. However, once the CIA/Fusion-GPS operation using Veselnitskaya started to unravel with public reporting back in Russia Deputy AG Karapetyan fell out of a helicopter to his death (just before it crashed).

Simultaneously timed in late 2015 through mid 2016, there was a domestic FBI operation using a young Russian named Maria Butina tasked to run up against republican presidential candidates . According to Patrick Byrne, Butina's handler, it was FBI agent Peter Strzok who was giving Byrne the instructions on where to send her. { Go Deep }

All of this context outlines the extent to which the CIA was openly involved in constructing a political operation that settled upon anyone in candidate Donald Trump's orbit.

International operations directed by the CIA, and domestic operations seemingly directed by Peter Strzok operating with a foot in both agencies. [ Strzok gets CIA service coin ]

Recap :

Additionally, Christopher Steele was a British intelligence officer, hired by Fusion-GPS to assemble and launder fraudulent intelligence information within his dossier. And we cannot forget Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch, who was recruited by Asst. FBI Director Andrew McCabe to participate in running an operation against the Trump campaign and create the impression of Russian involvement. Deripaska refused to participate .

All of this engagement directly controlled by U.S. intelligence; and all of this intended to give a specific Russia impression. This predicate is presumably what John Durham is currently reviewing.

The key point of all that background is to see how committed the CIA and FBI were to the constructed narrative of Russia interfering with the 2016 election. The CIA, FBI, and by extension the DOJ, put a hell of a lot of work into it. Intelligence community work that Durham is now unraveling.

We also know specifically that John Durham is looking at the construct of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA); and talking to CIA analysts who participated in the construct of the January 2017 report that bolstered the false appearance of Russian interference in the 2016 election. This is important because it ties in to the next part that involves Julian Assange and Wikileaks.

On April 11th, 2019, the Julian Assange indictment was unsealed in the EDVA. From the indictment we discover it was under seal since March 6th, 2018 : (Link to pdf)

On Tuesday April 15th more investigative material was released . Again, note the dates: Grand Jury, * December of 2017 * This means FBI investigation prior to .

The FBI investigation took place prior to December 2017, it was coordinated through the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) where Dana Boente was U.S. Attorney at the time. The grand jury indictment was sealed from March of 2018 until after Mueller completed his investigation, April 2019 .

Why the delay?

What was the DOJ waiting for?

Here's where it gets interesting .

The FBI submission to the Grand Jury in December of 2017 was four months after congressman Dana Rohrabacher talked to Julian Assange in August of 2017: "Assange told a U.S. congressman he can prove the leaked Democratic Party documents did not come from Russia."

( August 2017, The Hill Via John Solomon ) Julian Assange told a U.S. congressman on Tuesday he can prove the leaked Democratic Party documents he published during last year's election did not come from Russia and promised additional helpful information about the leaks in the near future.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican who is friendly to Russia and chairs an important House subcommittee on Eurasia policy, became the first American congressman to meet with Assange during a three-hour private gathering at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where the WikiLeaks founder has been holed up for years.

Rohrabacher recounted his conversation with Assange to The Hill. "Our three-hour meeting covered a wide array of issues, including the WikiLeaks exposure of the DNC [Democratic National Committee] emails during last year's presidential election," Rohrabacher said, "Julian emphatically stated that the Russians were not involved in the hacking or disclosure of those emails."

Pressed for more detail on the source of the documents, Rohrabacher said he had information to share privately with President Trump. ( read more )

Knowing how much effort the CIA and FBI put into the Russia collusion-conspiracy narrative, it would make sense for the FBI to take keen interest after this August 2017 meeting between Rohrabacher and Assange; and why the FBI would quickly gather specific evidence (related to Wikileaks and Bradley Manning) for a grand jury by December 2017.

Within three months of the grand jury the DOJ generated an indictment and sealed it in March 2018. The EDVA sat on the indictment while the Mueller probe was ongoing.

As soon as the Mueller probe ended, on April 11th, 2019, a planned and coordinated effort between the U.K. and U.S. was executed; Julian Assange was forcibly arrested and removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and the EDVA indictment was unsealed ( link ).

As a person who has researched this three year fiasco; including the ridiculously false 2016 Russian hacking/interference narrative: "17 intelligence agencies", Joint Analysis Report (JAR) needed for Obama's anti-Russia narrative in December '16; and then a month later the ridiculously political Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) in January '17; this timing against Assange is too coincidental.

It doesn't take a deep researcher to see the aligned Deep State motive to control Julian Assange because the Mueller report was dependent on Russia cybercrimes, and that narrative is contingent on the Russia DNC hack story which Julian Assange disputes.

This is critical. The Weissmann/Mueller report contains claims that Russia hacked the DNC servers as the central element to the Russia interference narrative in the U.S. election. This claim is directly disputed by WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, as outlined during the Dana Rohrabacher interview, and by Julian Assange on-the-record statements.

The predicate for Robert Mueller's investigation was specifically due to Russian interference in the 2016 election. The fulcrum for this Russia interference claim is the intelligence community assessment; and the only factual evidence claimed within the ICA is that Russia hacked the DNC servers; a claim only made possible by relying on forensic computer analysis from Crowdstrike, a DNC contractor.

The CIA holds a massive conflict of self-interest in upholding the Russian hacking claim. The FBI holds a massive interest in maintaining that claim. All of those foreign countries whose intelligence apparatus participated with Brennan and Strzok also have a vested self-interest in maintaining that Russia hacking and interference narrative.

Julian Assange is the only person with direct knowledge of how Wikileaks gained custody of the DNC emails; and Assange has claimed he has evidence it was not from a hack.

This Russian "hacking" claim is ultimately so important to the CIA, FBI, DOJ, ODNI and U.K intelligence apparatus . Well, right there is the obvious motive to shut Assange down as soon intelligence officials knew the Mueller report was going to be public.

Now, if we know this, and you know this; and everything is cited and factual well, then certainly AG Bill Barr knows this.

The $64,000 dollar question is: will they say so publicly?


Non-Corporate Entity , 7 minutes ago

Former NSA chief Bill Binney has forensic evidence that it was a download not a hack!!! Hello?!?!

exige42 , 22 seconds ago

I believe this all holds true. My only hesitation is why Assange hasn't retaliated. He was holed up in an Embassy for how many years because of these bastards? He had to have known they were going to make a move on him sooner or later. Where is his dead plan? I hate how these corrupt evil bastards have gotten their way forever. There has got to be a turn on these SOBs. Where is the fight from these people who they are destroying ffs???!!!

play_arrow
Dolar in a vortex , 1 minute ago

Jabba Barr and Bulldog Durham are a complete joke until they prove otherwise with significant indictments. And no, Steve Bannon doesn't count.

[Aug 19, 2020] American imperialism vs. EU imperialism: Pushed into the Ukrainian adventure by the US? Rubbish. The EU and its constituent members were attempting to play their own hand and were not merely following the US lead submissively.

Highly recommended!
Aug 19, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

likbez , 17 August 2020 at 11:05 AM

IMO NATO should have ended with the fall of the USSR. It now "confronts" a largely imaginary threat, concocted for the purpose of maintaining the status quo in US government expenditures for defense and supporting the imperial dreams of the neocons.

Does anyone really think Russia is going to invade the Baltics? Really?


Hear! Hear!
blue peacock , 17 August 2020 at 11:20 AM

Col. Lang,

Isn't the western alliance for all intents & purposes already dead?

It is a shame as it could work together to counter the totalitarian CCP. But Mama Merkel it seems would rather get a few yuan from the communists and turn a blind eye to CCP authoritarianism until it becomes obvious that the CCP are ruthless and will be competing with Germany around the world for machine tools and autos by undercutting them on price and heavily subsidizing their companies until German industry is destroyed.

Barbara Ann , 17 August 2020 at 11:57 AM

I have heard of these elusive creatures called "Europeans", but have yet to meet one, so am not able to comment on their alleged "smug superiority". How many divisions do they have?

JohnH , 17 August 2020 at 01:13 PM

If anything drives the US and Europe apart, it will be trade, not security. Germany is clearly chafing under the US bit, which sacrifices European industry to US interests -- sanctions on Nordstream 2, trade with Russia, trade with Iran, and China and Huawei. The US clearly prioritizes it's own LNG , finance, technology and arms industries over European prosperity. It amazes me that it has taken Europe so long to wake up.

Biden will do nothing to change that dynamic, since he is beholden to the same interests as Trump.

james , 17 August 2020 at 01:36 PM

nato is an anachronism much like a lot of western type institutions today..

i am predicting a trump win via the astro...

srw , 17 August 2020 at 01:58 PM

Does anyone really think Russia is going to invade the Baltics? The Baltics and most likely the Poles do with past history in mind. I would like to see them and the Ukrainians transition into something like the Finns who acknowledge Russian power but maintain their independence. Right now they are looking at NATO as their guarantee of independence in the future. Who can blame them when looking at history.

Polish Janitor , 17 August 2020 at 03:28 PM

Col. Lang,

The Trump admin's (and for that matter, Trump's own instincts) are and have continuously been quite correct with regards to EU's defense expenditures agenda. The European 'humanists' take advantage of the American defense umbrella inside their own countries so they can afford to NOT spend on defense and instead spend more on domestic and economic development. So while America continues to pay for the EU's defense it cannot afford to invest in its own domestic programs (infrastructure, etc.) adequately. These Europeans then with the collaboration of their Atlanticist fellows on the other side of the pond do nation-building and democratization projects (call it endless wars) abroad, such as in Afghanistan. Just don't ask them about their track record in this department.

However, the thing is when their immediate interests are in danger they forget about America in a heartbeat. Examples, Germany's Nordstream pipeline with Russia, 5G infrastructure and development, trade with China, Paris climate accord, etc.

I tend to believe that EU knows best how to make an existential threat out of Russia. Anyone still remembers the novichok incident back in 2018? The thing with Russia is that from the POV of EU, they view their Eastern neighbor as a solid and stable illiberal system that is not within the ideological orbit of the western liberal democracy and thus they feel threatened by that ideologically, NOT a scenario in which from Tallinn to Toulouse is invaded and captured by Putin. In this endeavor they also have found willing partners in 'anti-authoritarian' hawks such as Bob Kagan, Hilary, Sam Power et.al that tow the same line and advocate for NATO expansion and other similar projects.

The EU in definitely terrified of a scenario in which the U.S. (under a nationalist conservative administration) starts de-funding NATO or withdraws its troops from Europe. In this case they need to cut public spending and allocate more on defense which has a clear impact on the 'democratic spirit' of EU's over-hyped social democracy.

In the past few years we have seen the rise of right-wing populsit nationalist parties in pretty much every single major EU country. I believe there are strong tendencies in the Trump admin-if DJT manages to stay in power for another 4 years- to do a little *something something* about EU's decades-long nefarious free-riding of U.S. defense umbrella and I don't think the effeminate EU leaders will gonna like it very much.

English Outsider , 17 August 2020 at 04:31 PM


Barbara Ann - You say "I have heard of these elusive creatures called "Europeans", but have yet to meet one, so am not able to comment on their alleged "smug superiority". How many divisions do they have?"

The term "European" has become disputed territory. As an Englishman I regard myself fully as "European" as any German or Frenchman but for many the term now seems to mean exclusively "Member of the European Union". Tricky, that one.

Me, I prefer the term "Westerner". It takes in the so-called "Anglosphere" as well and therefore covers all the ground without going into the fact that some parts have become considerably less powerful over the last century and others considerably more. Also accommodates without fuss the fact that the cultural centre of gravity, at some indeterminate time in that last century, moved across from Paris, Vienna and Berlin to New York and parts west.

Not always to your advantage, to you as an American that is, because a fair chunk of the Frankfurt mob moved over your way with it. You caught from Old Europe the destructive and vacuous tenets of "Progressivism" and are now sharing the disease in its full vigour with us.

I mention that last because the violent TDS you see across the Atlantic isn't specifically European. It's merely that it's natural for progressives to detest Trump or rather, not the man himself but the "populist" forces he is taken to represent. It's garlic to the vampire for the progressive, the Little House on the Prairie or its various European equivalents, and the allergic reaction will become stronger yet. That "smug superiority" you will therefore find in the States as readily as you will find it here. America or here we live on sufferance in occupied territory, if we are not progressives ourselves, and should not the occupiers always be superior and smug?

I went hunting for the Telegraph article the Colonel discusses above. I didn't like that article at all. It gets the "freeloading" part right but in the context of a Russophobia that's seemingly set in stone. And the Telegraph is not so much a progressive newspaper as one that, while throwing a few token bones to its mainly Conservative readership, buys the progressive Weltanschauung just as much as the Guardian or New York Times.

"How many divisions do they have?" A few more than the pope but maybe that's not the point. I recently tried to follow the twists and turns of Mrs May's negotiations with the EU as they related to defence. I got the impression that in the matter of defence the supply of divisions could safely be left to the Americans. It was the allocation of defence contracts that they were all concerned about.

Deap , 17 August 2020 at 04:46 PM

Residing in Europe in the late 1960's at a US joint NATO military attachment in Northern Italy, we mused were we there to keep our eye on the Russians, or in fact keep our eyes on the Germans. One still saw in the back rooms, AXIS memorabilia.

As an aside: the only reason Michelle Obama chose as one of her FLOTUS projects - support of military families -- was so she could get Uncle Sam to jet her around to all those US military bases still in Europe for tea with the commander's wife and then on to her real purpose - shopping and having fun with friends and families she was able to drag along. On our dime.

Deap , 17 August 2020 at 04:53 PM

My last visit to Europe found there are now more Turks, than former "Europeans; except in France where they were more Algerians, than native French. And of course UK has long been little more than the entrenched polyglot of their vast far flung Empire.

Indeed, who is a "European" today. Birth rate demographics from the former colonies, boat people or import of cheap labor has now taken over anything we used to call "European". Can a resident Turk really serve up a perfect plate of raclette in Switzerland? One word answer: no. And that is a sad loss. One must instead shift their tastes to shwarma, if one wants European food today.

Diana Croissant , 17 August 2020 at 06:19 PM

In regard to Europeans--and perhaps some Australians whom I've met--I have often felt that they in some ways did feel a bit superior to Americans.

Their sense of superiority, however, seemed more rooted in a sense of cultural superiority. Those on the blog who viewed the comic rendition of the Three Little Pigs that was recently posted here might think of that and its wonderful ending about the house that was "American made." it was a wonderful ending for that well-known tale and a great defense of our culture's current limited and plain vocabulary in some groups.

As an English major and English teacher, so much of the great literature that we taught did come from England. I took three Comps when I earned my Masters: English literature from Beowulf (which I read in Old English) to Chaucer's Catterbury Tales (which I read in Middle English) and then to Virginia Woolf.

For my comp in American literature, I read from Washington Irving to the modern American writers at the time I was in college.

My third comp was in Modern Linguistic Theory.

Of course we taught Shakespeare and Dickens---English writers--to our junior high and high school classes. We studied mostly American writers in regard to short stories, as short stories are considered the American genre. Our teaching of poetry covered both English and American poets. As far as novels go, we taught both English and American novels.

Russian and German novelists were also on our list of reading for our comps. (We read them in English translation.)

In summary, American culture was often overshadowed by the many longer centureies of European culture in much of my college career.

What the Europeans can't deny, though they may want to, is that the tehcology and innovation in things like automobile production, electricity, telephones, and into space expoloration ---many things like that--is where we can indeed be quite proud.

They can continue to feel culturally superior to us if it makes them feel better. I defy them, however, to minimize our importance in World War II.

Babak makkinejad , 17 August 2020 at 11:24 PM

Deap

A European was understood, in Iran, to be a Christian. A Turk in Germany or and Algerian in France is just that, a Turk, an Algerian, i.e. another Muslim.

There are professional and managerial middle class French Muslims in Paris and elsewhere, but are they French? I do not know how assimilated they are.

Mathias Alexander , 18 August 2020 at 03:01 AM

" he will follow some Trump-era objectives, because that is what American interests demand, thus showing that Trump was no extremist on China."
So if Biden and Trump both want something, that shows that it isn't extreme. How does that work again?
The drive for confrontation with Russia contradicts Europe's desire to do buisness with her. Hence the end of the Western Alliance.

Mathias Alexander , 18 August 2020 at 04:18 AM

"The US faces a rapidly escalating political crisis. The losing party in November will undoubtedly go to the federal courts to claim that their opponents cheated in the process."
They all went along with electronic voting and postal ballots. Now they're all going to complain about the consequences.

Paco , 18 August 2020 at 04:43 AM

Of course NATO should have disappeared together with the Berlin Wall, but it is alive, kicking and ever looking for trouble, Belarus comes to mind.
The problem with propaganda is that the emitter ends up believing it, Europe does not need any protection, we have the means to protect ourselves.
The US is an occupation force, and on top of it demands payment for it. Pick up your gear and go home, and by the way, Europe should worry about countries armed to their teeth by the US, I'm thinking about Morocco for instance, since I live in Spain. The beautiful line of the Sierra that I contemplate every morning while stretching has been contaminated with a radar station of the Aegis system, and that means we in our quite and beautiful Andalusian town are a target for the biggies. Stop believing your propaganda, pick up your gear and let everybody take care of themselves, the benefits will be for the US population in the first place, and the world will rejoice.

A.I.S. , 18 August 2020 at 06:20 AM

The reason German military contribution to the "western alliance" is what it is is very simple.
It is according to the incentives that threats that German leadership perceives.

First: Objective strategic things:
Essentially, noone is going to invade Germany. This removes one major reason to have a large army. Secondly, Germany is not going to productively (in terms of return of investment) invade anyone else. This removes the second major reason to have a large army. There is something to be said to have a cadre army that can be surged into a real army if conditions change.

Second: Incentives of German political leaders.
While the degree of German vassal stateness concerning the USA is up to a degree of debate, that the USA has a lot of influence over Germany is in my view not. Schröder got elite regime changed over his Iraq war opposition (it was amazing that literally all the newspaper were against him, had a big impact on me growing up during this time).
Essentially, if you are in Nato, at some point, Uncle Sam will invite you to some adventure. If you say yes to this adventure you commit your armed forces to some confrontation in the middle east if you are lucky, or against Russia in Eastern Europe if you are unlucky. Your population is not going to like this, and you may face losing elections over this. It is also expensive in terms of life and material (although not very expensive compared to actual wars against competent enemies).
If you say no, Uncle Sam will be displeased with you and will make this known for example by sicking the entire "Transatlantic leadership networks" on you, which can also make you lose the next election.

Essentially, if Uncle Sam comes asking, you lose the next election if you say yes, and you also lose if you say no. Saying no is on balance cheaper, because you dont incurr the financial and human costs of joing a random US adventure on top of the risk of losing the next election.
The winning play is to get your army in such a state that Uncle Sam will not even ask.

Germany basically did create condition that enabled this.
Its a reasonably happy state for Germany to be in.

We are basically doing Brave Soldier Schweijk on the national level.

Solutions from a US pov:

1: Do less military adventures. If you do less adventures, people will fear being shanghaied along less. This will decrease the drawbacks associated with having a reasonable military as a Nato state.

2: Dont soft regime change governments that say no to your foreign adventures. Instead, maybe listen to them. Had the US listend to French and German criticism regarding the wisdom of going to war with Iraq, the US and also a lot of others would have been much better off.

3: Make it clear that particpation in foreign adventures is actually voluntary instead of "voluntary", make also clear that participation in defensive operations is not voluntary and is what Nato was created for and that you expect a considerable contribution towards this. Also, do some actual exercises. For example, if Germany claims that its military expenditure is sufficient, stress test this premise by having a realistic exercise in which a German divisions goes up against an American one. Yes, do some division size exercizes pretty please. Heck, after ensuring that this exercize wont be a failfest, have some Indian be the referee.

Barbara Ann , 18 August 2020 at 08:03 AM

Territoriality European Outsider

Now we are getting to the heart of the matter. My jest about never having met a European was of course designed to illustrate that "Europe" is a secondary construct. Never has a person, upon meeting me, introduced themselves as a "European".

Europe is a moveable feast and even territorial definitions are slippery. "Europeans" I think, must be characterized by short memories, for was it not less than 25 years ago that European NATO planes bombed their fellow Europeans in Bosnia? It can't have been an accident either, as I understand the op. was called "Operation Deliberate Force".

If Europe is synonymous with the EU it has precisely zero divisions and though you yourself may remain "Western", you are as a consequence of Brexit no longer "European". No, I think you and Polish Janitor are close by identifying "European" as a progressive/liberal, democratic (read "globalist") value system. An insufficiency of "European-ness" can thus be used to justify NATO involvement across various geographies - from Bosnia to Afghanistan (& shortly Belarus?).

But of course the "European" members of NATO are hardly on the same page. It looks not at all unlikely that two of its members may go to war in the Eastern Mediterranean.

I agree with you re the Telegraph article btw. "European" smugness is well represented in that organ.

nbsp; turcopolier , 18 August 2020 at 08:21 AM

Mathias Alexander

No. They did NOT all go along with "electronic voting and postal ballots." The 50 states each run federal elections in any way they please. The US Constitution requires that. There are a wide variety of voting machines in use and only a few states use mailed in ballots. the Republican Party particularly opposes mail in voting.

Barbara Ann , 18 August 2020 at 09:28 AM

Darn spellchecker "Territorially" of course EO.

I should also have added that "European" by the above definition is pretty much synonymous with "Atlanticist".

Jack , 18 August 2020 at 12:54 PM

Paco,

You should be complaining to the politicians you elect. They're the ones requesting US military protection. Prior to Trump, our governments were quite happy to provide that protection. He's now asking for some cost sharing.

Be careful though, before you know it Spain could become a vassal of the Chinese communists as many countries in Africa are finding out now. Hopefully you can continue to extract euros from the Germans and Dutch while battling the separatists in Catalonia. There's a thin veneer between stability & strife.

Deap , 18 August 2020 at 01:01 PM

Paco, with a huge cost of lives and treasure the US was twice asked to clean up Europe's self-inflicted messes in the past century. Promise you won't call on us again, and we can talk. I know, past is not necessarily prologue but do at least meet us half way. It is only good manners.

English Outsider , 18 August 2020 at 01:17 PM


Barbara Ann - Lots of Europes of course. "My" Europe may no longer be on the active list. Traces here and there. Few green shoots that are visible to me. Many rank growths overlaying it.

Also many "European Unions". They exist all right, in uneasy company.

So many "EU's". A ramshackle Northern European trading empire - I think that's too unstable to be long for this world but I could be wrong. A nascent superpower, that denied by many but for some their central aim.

A bureaucratic growth. A handy market place for all. A Holocaust memorial centre; when the EU politicians find themselves in a tight spot they can always call on Auschwitz and all fall back in line. I saw Mrs Merkel pull that trick at the last but one Munich Security Conference and all there, because Mrs Merkel was at that time in a very tight spot, applauded with relief.

A Progressive Shangri-La, all the more enticing for never being defined. Those adherents of that "EU" do actually call themselves "EU citizens" and I see the term is becoming more common usage. Maybe those are the self proclaimed "European citizens" you have not met.

And the producer of reams of lifeless prescription that seek to force all into the same mould and tough on the poor devils who can't fit the model. And on their families.

Lots of "EU's". I like none of them. While we wait for that edifice of delusion to collapse I hope the damage it does to "My" Europe is not irreparable.

Artemesia , 18 August 2020 at 02:26 PM

@ Diana Croissant: "They can continue to feel culturally superior to us if it makes them feel better. I defy them, however, to minimize our importance in World War II."

What an unfortunate conclusion to your essay.


Paco , 18 August 2020 at 05:47 PM

Jack, with all due respect, the politician who committed treason and gave away Spanish territory for a foreign power to install bases died in 1975, nobody voted for him, general Franco, an ally of Hitler, someone who sent over 50k troops to the siege of Leningrad, one of the greatest crimes in the history of mankind, a million casualties, mainly civilians, dead by hunger and disease, that fascist ally of Hitler we had to endure for 40 years, the price to close your eyes and your nose not to smell the stench were bases, an occupying force watching one of the strategic straights in Rota, close to Gibraltar, plus other bases inland. I could go on, and remind you of 4H bombs dropped over Palomares after a broken arrow incident, one of them broke and plutonium is still poisoning an area that your government is not willing to clean. So that is what foreign occupation looks like, if something goes wrong, well, we are protecting you . they say. History should be taught with a bit more detail in the USA.

English Outsider , 18 August 2020 at 06:35 PM

A.I.S

I'm afraid you're reading the dynamics of the European/US relationship quite incorrectly. Bluntly, you have the facts wrong.

This site, and particularly the Colonel's committee of correspondence, is packed with experts who have lived in this field and know their way around it. So I don't venture a comprehensive rebuttal myself - my knowledge is partial and I do not have the background to be sure of getting it dead right. But here -

"Essentially, if you are in Nato, at some point, Uncle Sam will invite you to some adventure. If you say yes to this adventure you commit your armed forces to some confrontation in the middle east if you are lucky, or against Russia in Eastern Europe if you are unlucky."

That is transparent nonsense.

Obama has stated that it was the Europeans, including the UK, who pushed him into some middle East interventions. I don't think he was shooting a line. The leaked Blumenthal emails confirm that and we merely have to look at the thrust of French military actions to understand that the French in particular push continually for intervention in the ME.

They are still doing so, and not for R2P purposes. They would see the ME and parts of Africa as part of the EU sphere of influence and their initial reaction to Trump's abortive attempt to withdraw from Syria shows they would be more than prepared to go it alone there if they could.

A squalid bunch, and here I must include my own country in that verdict. Reliant on US logistics and military strength they seek to pursue their own interests and could they but do so they would do so unassisted. Don't pretend that it's the Americans who force them into these genocidal adventures.


As for the Ukraine, we see from Sakwa's unflattering study of the EU adventure there that that was building up well before 2014. The dramatic rejection of the EU deal was the prelude to the coup. The Ashton tape shows an astonishing degree of EU intervention in Ukrainian internal affairs before that coup. And from the Nuland tape we get a glimpse of the EU regime change project that shows it was deeply implicated.

Pushed into the Ukrainian adventure by the US? Rubbish. The EU and its constituent members were attempting to play their own hand and were not merely following the US lead submissively.

We hear little of European neocon ventures. But what little has surfaced about them shows that your picture of peace loving Europeans dragged into these conflicts by an overbearing "Uncle Sam" is dishonest and misleading.

So I tell my German friends and relatives when they push the same line. They look at me with disbelief and go off and hunt around the internet themselves. And then come back and do not disagree. I suggest you do the same. The facts are all there, even for those of us without inside knowledge or who lack the requisite background.

[Aug 19, 2020] Democrats are in bed with the deep state, take billions from the largest corporations, and conduct the most undemocratic nominating process ever seen in the US, but thank God they are not fascists!

Highly recommended!
Aug 19, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

MrBoompi , 3 hours ago

Democrats are in bed with the deep state, take billions from the largest corporations, and conduct the most undemocratic nominating process ever seen in the US, but thank god they are not fascists!

Trezrek500 , 2 hours ago

It is amazing, Bezos becomes the richest guy in the world and the delivery of his packages is subsidized by tax payers. The USPS should triple their rates to AMZN. Problem solved.

[Aug 16, 2020] CIA Behind Guccifer Russiagate A Plausible Scenario

Highly recommended!
Aug 16, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

If Zerohedge comment reflect general population sentiments this is clear sign of the crisis of legitimacy of neoliberal élite.

Via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

William Binney is the former technical director of the U.S. National Security Agency who worked at the agency for 30 years. He is a respected independent critic of how American intelligence services abuse their powers to illegally spy on private communications of U.S. citizens and around the globe.

Given his expert inside knowledge, it is worth paying attention to what Binney says.

In a media interview this week, he dismissed the so-called Russiagate scandal as a "fabrication" orchestrated by the American Central Intelligence Agency. Many other observers have come to the same conclusion about allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. elections with the objective of helping Donald Trump get elected.

But what is particularly valuable about Binney's judgment is that he cites technical analysis disproving the Russiagate narrative. That narrative remains dominant among U.S. intelligence officials, politicians and pundits, especially those affiliated with the Democrat party, as well as large sections of Western media. The premise of the narrative is the allegation that a Russian state-backed cyber operation hacked into the database and emails of the Democrat party back in 2016. The information perceived as damaging to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was subsequently disseminated to the Wikileaks whistleblower site and other U.S. media outlets.

A mysterious cyber persona known as "Guccifer 2.0" claimed to be the alleged hacker. U.S. intelligence and news media have attributed Guccifer as a front for Russian cyber operations.

Notably, however, the Russian government has always categorically denied any involvement in alleged hacking or other interference in the 2016 U.S. election, or elections thereafter.

William Binney and other independent former U.S. intelligence experts say they can prove the Russiagate narrative is bogus. The proof relies on their forensic analysis of the data released by Guccifer. The analysis of timestamps demonstrates that the download of voluminous data could not have been physically possible based on known standard internet speeds. These independent experts conclude that the data from the Democrat party could not have been hacked, as Guccifer and Russiagaters claim. It could only have been obtained by a leak from inside the party, perhaps by a disgruntled staffer who downloaded the information on to a disc. That is the only feasible way such a huge amount of data could have been released. That means the "Russian hacker" claims are baseless.

Wikileaks, whose founder Julian Assange is currently imprisoned in Britain pending an extradition trial to the U.S. to face espionage charges, has consistently maintained that their source of files was not a hacker, nor did they collude with Russian intelligence. As a matter of principle, Wikileaks does not disclose the identity of its sources, but the organization has indicated it was an insider leak which provided the information on senior Democrat party corruption.

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William Binney says forensic analysis of the files released by Guccifer shows that the mystery hacker deliberately inserted digital "fingerprints" in order to give the impression that the files came from Russian sources. It is known from information later disclosed by former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that the CIA has a secretive program – Vault 7 – which is dedicated to false incrimination of cyber attacks to other actors. It seems that the purpose of Guccifer was to create the perception of a connection between Wikileaks and Russian intelligence in order to beef up the Russiagate narrative.

"So that suggested [to] us all the evidence was pointing back to CIA as the originator [of] Guccifer 2.0. And that Guccifer 2.0 was inside CIA I'm pointing to that group as the group that was probably the originator of Guccifer 2.0 and also this fabrication of the entire story of Russiagate," concludes Binney in his interview with Sputnik news outlet.

This is not the first time that the Russiagate yarn has been debunked . But it is crucially important to make Binney's expert views more widely appreciated especially as the U.S. presidential election looms on November 3. As that date approaches, U.S. intelligence and media seem to be intensifying claims about Russian interference and cyber operations. Such wild and unsubstantiated "reports" always refer to the alleged 2016 "hack" of the Democrat party by "Guccifer 2.0" as if it were indisputable evidence of Russian interference and the "original sin" of supposed Kremlin malign activity. The unsubstantiated 2016 "hack" is continually cited as the "precedent" and "provenance" of more recent "reports" that purport to claim Russian interference.

Given the torrent of Russiagate derivatives expected in this U.S. election cycle, which is damaging U.S.-Russia bilateral relations and recklessly winding up geopolitical tensions, it is thus of paramount importance to listen to the conclusions of honorable experts like William Binney.

The American public are being played by their own intelligence agencies and corporate media with covert agendas that are deeply anti-democratic.


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lay_arrow desertboy , 13 hours ago

Well - who set up them up, converted from the OSS? The banksters.

"Wild Bill" Donovan worked for JP Morgan immediately after WWII.

"our" US intelligence agencies were set up by, and serve, the masters of high finance. Is this in dispute?

meditate_vigorously , 11 hours ago

They have seeded enough misinformation that apparently it is. But, you are correct. It is the Banksters.

Isisraelquaeda , 2 hours ago

Israel. The CIA was infiltrated by the Mossad long ago.

SurfingUSA , 15 hours ago

JFK was on to that truth, and would have been wise to mini-nuke Langley before his ill-fated journey to Dallas.

Andrew G , 11 hours ago

Except when there's something exceptionally evil (like pedo/blackmail rings such as Epstein), in which case it's Mossad / Aman

vova.2018 , 7 hours ago

Except when there's something exceptionally evil (like pedo/blackmail rings such as Epstein), in which case it's Mossad / Aman

The CIA & MOSSAD work hand in hand in all their clandestine operations. There is not doubt the CIA/MOSSAD are behind the creation, evolution, training, supplying weapons, logistic-planning & financing of the terrorists & the destruction of the Middle East. Anybody that believes the contrary has brain problems & need to have his head examined.

CIA/MOSAD has been running illegal activities in Colombia: drug, arms, organs & human (child-sex) trafficking. CIA/MOSAD is also giving training, logistic & arms to Colombia paramilitary for clandestine operation against Venezuela. After Bolsonaro became president, MOSSAD started running similar operation in Brazil. Israel & Brazil also recognizes Guaido as the legit president of Venezuela.

​​​​​​CIA/MOSSAD have a long time policy of assassinating & taking out pep who are a problem to the revisionist-zionist agenda, not just in the M-East but in the world. The CIA/MOSSAD organizations have many connections in other countries like the M-East, Saudi Arabia, UAE, et al but also to the UK-MI5.

The Israelis infiltrated the US to the highest levels a long time ago - Proof

  • Israel has & collects information (a database) of US citizens in coordination with the CIA & the 5 eyes.
  • Israel works with the NSA in the liaison-loophole operations
  • Mossad undercover operations in WDC & all over the world
  • The American Israel Public Affairs Committee – AIPAC
  • People with 2 citizenships (US/Israel) in WDC/NYC (the real Power)
  • From Steve Bannon a christian-zionist: Collusion between the Trump administration and Israel .
  • D-Trump, Ivanka Trump & husband Kushner (orthodox Juus)
  • Epstein & Ghislaine Maxwell, members of the MOSSAD ran their entire pedo-honey-pot operation for the CIA/Mossad
  • CIA/MOSSA want to punish Iran for its role in Syria's victory over ISIS (created by CIA/Mossad) - PROOF: McCain Armed ISIS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziNlUuc167E

New book details Israel's secret history of assassinations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge-mnC2wGss

CIA Assassination Manual Revealed (CIA = Cover action agency)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3gQfoFCpPs

GreatUncle , 6 hours ago

Well I never expected anything different.

They have a hand in everything and probably the murder of JFK.

Hell the CIA have even had their own president.

They are supposed to be commanded by the president but personally I think they are a rogue operation controlled by somebody else.

Lyman54 , 16 hours ago

Millie Weavers documentary explains everything quite well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HFxVvrXjCg

sborovay07 , 15 hours ago

Funny how a number of the right wing conspiracy stories according to the MSM from a couple years back were true from the get go. 1 indictment over 4 years in the greatest attempted coup in this country's history. So sad that Binney and Assange were never listened to. They can try to silence us who know of the truth, but as Winston Churchill once said, 'Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it. Ignorance may deride it. Malice may distort it. But there it is.' KDP still censors my book on their advertising platform as it promotes conspiratorial theories (about the Obama led coup) and calls out BLM and Antifa for what they are (marxists) . Yet the same platform still recommends BLM books stating there is a pandemic of cops killing innocent blacks. F them!!!! #RIPSeth #FreeJulian #FreeMillie

smacker , 11 hours ago

Yes, and we all know the name of the DNC leaker who downloaded and provided WikiLeaks
with evidence of CIA and DNC corruption.
He was assassinated to prevent him from naming who Guccifer 2.0 was and where he is located.

The Russia-gate farce itself provides solid evidence that the CIA and others are in bed with DNC
and went to extraordinary lengths to prevent Trump being elected. When that failed, they instigated
a program of x-gates to get him out of office any way they could. This continues to this day.

This is treason at the highest level.

ACMeCorporations , 12 hours ago

Hacking? What Russian hacking?

In recently released testimony, the CEO of CrowdStrike admitted in congressional testimony, under oath, that it actually has no direct evidence Russia stole the DNC emails.

Nelbev , 9 hours ago

"The proof relies on their forensic analysis of the data released by Guccifer. The analysis of timestamps demonstrates that the download of voluminous data could not have been physically possible based on known standard internet speeds. ... a disgruntled staffer who downloaded the information on to a disc. That is the only feasible way such a huge amount of data could have been released. ... William Binney says forensic analysis of the files released by Guccifer shows that the mystery hacker deliberately inserted digital "fingerprints" in order to give the impression that the files came from Russian sources. ... "

Any computer file is a bunch of 1s and 0s. Anyone can change anything with a hex editor. E.g. I had wrong dates on some photographs once, downloaded as opposed to when taken, just edited the time stamp. You cannot claim any time stamp is original. If true time stamps, then the DNC files were downloaded to a thumb drive at a computer on location and not to the internet via a phone line. However anyone can change the time stamps. Stating a "mystery hacker deliberately inserted digital [Russian] 'fingerprints' " is a joke if denying the file time stamps were not tampered with. The real thing is where the narrative came from, political spin doctors, Perkins Coie law firm hired by DNC and Hillary campaign who hired Crowdstrike [and also hired Fusion GPS before for pissgate dossier propaganda and FISC warrants to spy on political opponents] and Perkins Coie edited Crowdstrike report with Russian narrative. FBI never looked at DNC servers. This is like your house was broken into. You deny police the ability to enter and look at evidence like DNC computers. You hire a private investigator to say your neighbor you do not like did it and publicise accusations. Take word of political consultants hired, spin doctor propaganda, Crowdstrike narrative , no police investigation. Atlantic Council?

Vivekwhu , 8 hours ago

The Atlantic Council is another NATO fart. Nuff said!

The_American , 15 hours ago

God Damn traitor Obama!

Yen Cross , 14 hours ago

TOTUS

For the youngsters.

Teleprompter Of The United States.

Leguran , 6 hours ago

The CIA has gotten away with so much criminal behavior and crimes against the American public that this is totally believable. Congress just lets this stuff happen and does nothing. Which is worse - Congress or the CIA?

Congress set up the system. It is mandated to perform oversight. And it just sits on its thumbs and wallows in it privileges.

This time Congress went further than ever before. It was behind and engaged in an attempted coup d'état.

Know thy enemy , 10 hours ago

Link to ShadowGate (ShadowNet) documentary - which answers the question, what is the keystone,,,,,

https://www.pscp.tv/Tore_says/1RDGlrYynRgxL

"Comey here, and Holder, while I get a rope for Lynch, and don't forget Brennan."

Kudo's to Millie

DontHateMeBecauseImABureaucrat , 9 hours ago

Neither google nor Apple will open the link. Or it's not there.

bringonthebigone , 8 hours ago

currently it is up here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HFxVvrXjCg

I Claudius , 5 hours ago

It's time for Assange and Wikileaks to name the person who they rec'd the info from. By hiding behind the "we don't name names" Mantra they are helping destroy America by polarizing its citizens. Name the damn person, get it all out there so the left can see that they've been played by their leaders. Let's cut this crap.

freedommusic , 7 hours ago

...all the evidence was pointing back to CIA as the originator [of] Guccifer 2.0.

Yep, I knew since day one. I remember seeing Hillary Clinton talking about Guccifer . As soon as uttered the name, I KNEW she with the CIA were the brainchild of this bogus decoy.

They copy. They mimic. These are NOT creative individuals.

Perhaps hell is too good a place for them.

on target , 4 hours ago

This is old news but worth bringing up again. The CIA never wanted Trump in, and of course, they want him out. Their fingerprints were all over Russiagate, The Kavanaugh hearings, Ukrainegate, and on and on. They are just trying to cover their asses for a string of illegal "irregularities" in their operations for years. Trump should never have tried to be a get along type of guy. He should have purged the entire leadership of the CIA on day one and the FBI on day 2. They can not be trusted with an "America First" agenda. They are all New World Order types who know whats best for everyone.

fersur , 7 hours ago

Boom, Boom, Boom !

Three Reseachable Tweets thru Facebook, I cut all at once, Unedited !

"#SusanRice has as much trouble with her memory as #HillaryClinton. Rice testified in writing that she 'does not recall' who gave her key #Benghazi talking points she used on TV, 'does not recall' being in any meetings regarding Benghazi in five days following the attack, and 'does not recall' communicating with anyone in Clinton's office about Benghazi," Tom Fitton in Breitbart.

"Adam Schiff secretly subpoenaed, without court authorization, the phone records of Rudy Giuliani and then published the phone records of innocent Americans, including @realDonaldTrump 's lawyers, a member of Congress, and a journalist," @TomFitton .

BREAKING: Judicial Watch announced today that former #Obama National Security Advisor and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, admitted in written responses given under oath that she emailed with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Clinton's non-government email account and that she received emails related to government business on her own personal email account.

STONEHILLADY , 7 hours ago

It's not just the Democrats, the warmongering neocons of the Republican party are also in on it, the Bush/Romney McCain/McConnell/Cheney and many more. It's called "Kick Backs" Ever notice these so called retired Generals all end up working for all these spying companies that span the 5eyes to Israel. It seems our POTUS has got his hands full swimming up stream to get this stopped and actually get rid of the CIA. It's the number 1 reason he doesn't trust these people, they all try to tell him stuff that is mis-directed.

Liars, leakers, and thieves are running not only our nation but the world, as George Carlin said, "It's a Big Club, and we ain't in it." If you fall for this false narrative of mail in voting and not actually go and vote on election day, you better start learning Chinese for surely Peelosi and Schumer will have their way and mess up this election so they can drag Trump out of office and possible do him and his family some serious harm, all because so many of you listen to the MSM and don't research their phony claims.

Max21c , 7 hours ago

It's called "Kick Backs" Ever notice these so called retired Generals all end up working for all these spying companies that span the 5eyes to Israel.

American Generals & Admirals are a lot more corrupt today than they were a few generations back. Many of them are outright evil people in today's times. Many of these people are just criminals that will steal anything they can get their banana republic klepto-paws on. They're nothing but common criminals and thieves. No different than the Waffen SS or any other group of brigands, bandits, and criminal gangsters.

Max21c , 7 hours ago

The CIA, FBI, NSA, Military Intelligence, Pentagon Gestapo, defense contractors are mixed up in a lot of crimes and criminal activities on American soil against American citizens and American civilians. They do not recognize borders or laws or rights of liberty or property rights or ownership or intellectual property. They're all thieves and criminals in the military secret police and secret police gangsters cabal.

BandGap , 7 hours ago

I have seen Binney's input. He is correct in my view because he scientifically/mathematically proves his point.

The blinded masses do not care about this approach, just like wearing masks.

The truth is too difficult for many to fit into their understanding of the world.

So they repeat what they have been told, never stopping to consider the facts or how circumstances have been manipulated.

It is frustrating to watch, difficult to navigate at times for me. Good people who will not stop and think of what the facts show them.

otschelnik , 8 hours ago

It could have been the CIA or it could have been one of the cut-outs for plausible deniability, and of all the usual suspects it was probably CrowdStrike.

- CGI / Global Strategy Group / Analysis Corp. - John Brennan (former CEO)

- Dynology, Wikistrat - General James L. Jones (former chairman of Atlantic Council, NSA under Obama)

- CrowdStrike - Dmitri Alperovich and Shawn Henry (former chief of cyber forensics FBI)

- Clearforce - Michael Hayden (former dir. NSA under Clinton, CIA under Bush) and Jim Jones Jr. (son Gnrl James Jones)

- McChrystal Group - Stanley McChrystal (former chief of special operations DOD)

fersur , 8 hours ago

Unedited !

The Brookings Institute – a Deep State Hub Connected to the Fake Russia Collusion and Ukraine Scandals Is Now Also Connected to China Spying In the US

The Brookings Institute was heavily involved in the Democrat and Deep State Russia collusion hoax and Ukraine impeachment fraud. These actions against President Trump were criminal.

This institute is influenced from foreign donations from entities who don't have an America first agenda. New reports connect the Institute to Chinese spying.

As we reported previously, Julie Kelly at American Greatness released a report where she addresses the connections between the Brookings Institute, Democrats and foreign entities. She summarized her report as follows: Accepting millions from a state sponsor of terrorism, foisting one of the biggest frauds in history on the American people, and acting as a laundering agent of sorts for Democratic political contributions disguised as policy grants isn't a good look for such an esteemed institution. One would be hard-pressed to name a more influential think tank than the Brookings Institution. The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit routinely ranks at the top of the list of the best think tanks in the world; Brookings scholars produce a steady flow of reports, symposiums, and news releases that sway the conversation on any number of issues ranging from domestic and economic policy to foreign affairs.

​​ Brookings is home to lots of Beltway power players: Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, former chairmen of the Federal Reserve, are Brookings fellows. Top officials from both Republican and Democrat presidential administrations lend political heft to the organization. From 2002 until 2017, the organization's president was Strobe Talbott. He's a longtime BFF of Bill Clinton; they met in the 1970s at Oxford University and have been tight ever since. Talbott was a top aide to both President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Kelly continued:

Brookings-based fellows working at Lawfare were the media's go-to legal "experts" to legitimize the concocted crime; the outlet manipulated much of the news coverage on collusion by pumping out primers and guidance on how to report collusion events from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's appointment to his final report.

Now, testimony related to a defamation lawsuit against Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous "dossier" on Donald Trump, has exposed his direct ties to Talbott in 2016 when he was still head of Brookings. Talbott and Steele were in communication before and after the presidential election; Steele wanted Talbott to circulate the dossier to his pals in John Kerry's State Department, which reportedly is what Talbott did . Steele also briefed top state department officials in October 2016 about his work.

But this isn't the only connection between the Brookings Institute and the Russia collusion and Ukrainian scandals. We were the first to report that the Primary Sub-Source (PSS) in the Steele report, the main individual who supplied Steele with bogus information in his report was Igor Danchenko.

In November 2019, the star witness for the Democrat Representative Adam Schiff's impeachment show trial was announced. Her name was Fiona Hill.

Today we've uncovered that Hill is a close associate of the Primary Sub-Source (PSS) for the Steele dossier – Igor Danchenko – the individual behind most all the lies in the Steele dossier. No wonder Hill saw the Steele dossier before it was released. Her associate created it.

Both Fiona Hill and Igor Danchenko are connected to the Brookings Institute.

They gave a presentation together as Brookings Institute representatives:

Kelly writes about the foreign funding the Brookings Institute partakes:

So who and what have been funding the anti-Trump political operation at Brookings over the past few years? The think tank's top benefactors are a predictable mix of family foundations, Fortune 100 corporations, and Big Tech billionaires. But one of the biggest contributors to Brookings' $100 million-plus annual budget is the Embassy of Qatar. According to financial reports, Qatar has donated more than $22 million to the think tank since 2004. In fact, Brookings operates a satellite center in Doha, the capital of Qatar. The wealthy Middle Eastern oil producer spends billions on American institutions such as universities and other think tanks.

Qatar also is a top state sponsor of terrorism, pouring billions into Hamas, al-Qaeda, and the Muslim Brotherhood, to name a few. "The nation of Qatar, unfortunately, has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level," President Trump said in 2017. "We have to stop the funding of terrorism."

An email from a Qatari official, obtained by WikiLeaks, said the Brookings Institution was as important to the country as "an aircraft carrier."

Yesterday the Brookings Institute was connected to spying by Communist China in a post at the Washington Free Beacon :

Part 1 of 2

fersur , 8 hours ago

Part 2 of 2 !

The Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington, D.C., think tank, partnered with a Shanghai policy center that the FBI has described as a front for China's intelligence and spy recruitment operations, according to public records and federal court documents.

The Brookings Doha Center, the think tank's hub in Qatar, signed a memorandum of understanding with the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences in January 2018, the institution said . The academy is a policy center funded by the Shanghai municipal government that has raised flags within the FBI.

The partnership raises questions about potential Chinese espionage activities at the think tank, which employs numerous former government officials and nearly two dozen current foreign policy advisers to Joe Biden's presidential campaign.

It is really frightening that one of two major political parties in the US is tied so closely with the Brookings Institute. It is even more frightening that foreign enemies of the United States are connected to this entity as well.

Let it Go , 8 hours ago

One thing for sure is these guys have far to much of our money to spend promoting their own good.

fersur , 7 hours ago

Unedited !

Mueller Indictments Tied To "ShadowNet," Former Obama National Security Advisor and Obama's CIA Director – Not Trump

By Patrick Bergy, Cyber-Security, Veteran & Former DoD Contractor

December 18th, 2018

According to a report in the Daily Beast, which cited the Wall Street Journal's reporting of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into two companies, Wikistrat and Psy Group, "The firm's advisory council lists former CIA and National Security Agency director Michael Hayden, former national security adviser James L. Jones."

According to numerous reporting from major news outlets like the Wall Street Journal and Daily Beast, both Wikistrat and Psy Group represent themselves as being social media analysts and black PSYOP organizations. Both Wikistrat and Psy Group have foreign ownership mixed between Israeli, Saudi (Middle East) and Russian. Here is what the Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast and pretty much everyone else out there doesn't know (or won't tell you).

The fact Obama's former National Security Advisor, General James Jones, and former Obama CIA director, Gen. Michael Hayden, are both on Wikistrat's advisory board may not seem suspicious, but both of these general's have another thing in common, and that is the ShadowNet. The ShadowNet, and its optional companion relational database, iPsy, were both originally developed by the small, family owned defense contracting company, Dynology. The family that owns Dynology; Gen. James Jones. I would add Paul Manafort and Rick Davis was Dynology's partner at the time we were making the ShadowNet and iPsy commercially available.

After obtaining the contract in Iraq to develop social media psychological warfare capabilities, known in military nomenclature as Interactive Internet Activities, or IIA, Gen. Jones kept the taxpayer funded application we developed in Iraq for the 4th Psychological Operation Group, and made it commercially available under the trademark of the "ShadowNet" and the optional black PSYOP component, "iPsy." If you think it is interesting that one of the companies under Mueller's indictment is named, "Psy" Group, I did as well. In fact, literally everything both publicly described in news reports, and even their websites, are exactly the same as the ShadowNet and iPsy I helped build, and literally named.

The only thing different I saw as far as services offered by Wikistrat, and that of Dynology and the ShadowNet, was described by The Daily Beast as, "It also engaged in intelligence collection." Although iPsy was a relational database that allowed for the dissemination of whatever the required narrative was, "intelligence collection" struck another bell with me, and that's a company named ClearForce.

ClearForce was developed as a solution to stopping classified leaks following the Edward Snowden debacle in 2013. Changes in NISPOM compliance requirements forced companies and government agencies that had employees with government clearances to take preventive measure to mitigate the potential of leaking. Although the NISPOM compliance requirement almost certainly would have been influenced by either Hayden, Jones or both, they once again sought to profit from it.

Using components of the ShadowNet and iPsy, the ClearForce application (which the company, ClearForce, was named after,) was developed to provide compliance to a regulation I strongly suspect you will find Jones and Hayden had a hand in creating. In fact, I strongly suspect you will find General Jones had some influence in the original requirement for our Iraq contract Dynology won to build the ShadowNet – at taxpayer expense! Dynology worked for several years incorporating other collection sources, such as financial, law enforcement and foreign travel, and ties them all into your social media activity. Their relationship with Facebook and other social media giants would have been nice questions for congress to have asked them when they testified.

Part 1 of 2 !

fersur , 7 hours ago

Part 2 of 2 !

The ClearForce application combines all of these sources together in real-time and uses artificial intelligence to predictively determine if you are likely to steal or leak based on the behavioral profile ClearForce creates of you. It can be used to determine if you get a job, and even if you lose a job because a computer read your social media, credit and other sources to determine you were likely to commit a crime. It's important for you to stop for a moment and think about the fact it is privately controlled by the former CIA director and Obama's National Security Advisor/NATO Supreme Allied Commander, should scare the heck out of you.

When the ClearForce application was complete, Dynology handed it off to ClearForce, the new company, and Michael Hayden joined the board of directors along with Gen. Jones and his son, Jim, as the president of ClearForce. Doesn't that kind of sound like "intelligence collection" described by the Daily Beast in Wikistrat's services?

To wrap this all up, Paul Manafort, Rick Davis, George Nader, Wikistrat and Psy Group are all directly connected to Mueller's social media influence and election interreference in the 2016 presidential election. In fact, I believe all are under indictment, computers seized, some already sentenced. All of these people under indictment by Mueller have one key thing in common, General James Jones's and Michael Hayden's social media black PSYOP tools; the ShadowNet, iPsy and ClearForce.

A recent meeting I had with Congressman Gus Bilirakis' chief of staff, Elizabeth Hittos, is confirmation that they are reviewing my DoD memorandum stating the work I did on the IIA information operation in Iraq, the Dynology marketing slicks for the ShadowNet and iPsy, along with a screenshot of Goggle's Way-Back Machine showing Paul Manafort's partnership with Dynology in 2007 and later. After presenting to her these facts and making clear I have much more information that requires the highest classification SCIF to discuss and requires being read-on to the program, Elizabeth contacted the office of Congressman Devin Nunez to request that I brief the intelligence committee on this critical information pertaining directly to the 2010 Ukrainian elections, Michael Brown riots, 2016 election interference and the "Russia collusion" hoax. All of that is on top of numerous questionable ethical and potentially illegal profits from DoD contracts while servings as NATO Commander and Obama's National Security Advisor.

We also need to know if the ShadowNet and iPsy were allowed to fall into foreign hands, including Russia, Saudi Arabia and Israel. I'm pretty sure South America is going to have a few questions for Jones and Obama as well? Stay tuned!

Balance-Sheet , 4 hours ago

Intelligence Agencies of all countries endlessly wage war at all times especially 'Information Warfare' (propaganda/disinformation) and the primary target has always and will always be the domestic population of the Intelligence Agency's country.

Yes, of course the CIA does target ALL other countries but the primary target will always be the Americans themselves.

Balance-Sheet , 4 hours ago

Intelligence Agencies of all countries endlessly wage war at all times especially 'Information Warfare' (propaganda/disinformation) and the primary target has always and will always be the domestic population of the Intelligence Agency's country.

Yes, of course the CIA does target ALL other countries but the primary target will always be the Americans themselves.

Paralentor , 5 hours ago

A lot more detail can be found here:

https://banned.video/watch?id=5f37fcc2df77c4044ee2eb03

SHADOW GATE – FULL FILM

462,864 views

yerfej , 8 hours ago

The neoliberals own the media, courts, academia, and BUREAUCRACY (including CIA) and they will do anything to make sure they retain power over everyone. These control freaks work hard to create all sorts of enemies to justify their existence.

LaugherNYC , 15 hours ago

It is sad that this information has to be repeatedly published, over and over and over, by SCI and other Russian. outlets.

Because no legit AMERICAN news outlet will give Binney or Assange the time of day or any credence, this all becomes Kremlin-sponsored disinformation and denials. People roll their eyes and say "Oh God, not the whole 'Seth Rich was murdered by the CIA' crap again!! You know, his FAMILY has asked that people stop spreading these conspiracy theories and lies."

SCI is a garbage bin, nothing more than a dizinformatz machine for Putin, but in this case, they are likely right. It seems preposterous that the "best hackers in the world" would forget to use a VPN or leave a signature behind, and it makes far more sense that the emails were leaked by someone irate at the abuses of the DNC - the squashing of Bernie, the cheating for Hillary in the debates - behavior we saw repeated in 2020 with Bernie shoved aside again for the pathetic Biden.

Would that SOMEONE in the US who is not on the Kremlin payroll would pick up this thread. But all the "investigative journalists" now work indirectly for the DNC, and those that don't are cancelled by the left.

Stone_d_agehurler , 15 hours ago

I am Guccifer and I approve this message.

Sarc/

But i do share your opinion. They are likely right this time and most of the pundits and media in the U. S. know it. That's what makes this a sad story about how rotten the U. S. system has become.

Democrats will sacrifice the Union for getting Trump out of office.

If elections in Nov won't go their way, Civil War II might become a real thing in 2021.

PeterLong , 4 hours ago

If " digital "fingerprints" in order to give the impression that the files came from Russian sources" were inserted in the leak by "Guccifer", and if the leak to wikileaks came from Seth Rich, via whatever avenue, then the "Guccifer" release came after the wikileaks release, or after wikileaks had the files, and was a reaction to same attempting to diminish their importance/accuracy and cast doubt on Trump. Could CIA and/or DNC have known the files were obtained by wikileaks before wikileaks actually released them? In any case collusion of CIA with DNC seems to be a given.

RightlyIndignent , 4 hours ago

Because Seth had already given it to Wikileaks. There is no 'Fancy Bear'. There is no 'Cozy Bear'. Those were made up by CrowdStrike, and they tried the same crap on Ukraine, and Ukraine told them to pound sand. When push came to shove, and CrowdStrike was forced to say what they really had under oath, they said: "We have nothing."

novictim , 4 hours ago

You are leaving out Crowd Strike. Seth Rich was tasked by people at the DNC to copy data off the servers. He made a backup copy and gave a copy to people who then got it to Wiki leaks. He used highspeed file transfers to local drives to do his task.

Meanwhile, it was the Ukrainian company Crowd Strike that claimed the data was stolen over the internet and that the thieves were in Russia. That 'proof" was never verified by US Intelligence but was taken on its word as being true despite crowd strike falsifying Russian hacks and being caught for it in the past.

Joebloinvestor , 5 hours ago

The "five eyes" are convinced they run the world and try to.

That is what Brennan counted on for these agencies to help get President Trump.

As I said, it is time for the UK and the US to have a serious conversation about their current and ex-spies being involved in US elections.

Southern_Boy , 5 hours ago

It wasn't the CIA. It was John Brennan and Clapper. The CIA, NSA FBI, DOJ and the Ukrainian Intelligence Service just went along working together and followed orders from Brennan who got them from Hillary and Obama.

Oh, and don't forget the GOP Globalist RINOs who also participated in the coup attempt: McCain, Romney, Kasich, Boehner, Lee and Richard Burr.

With Kasich now performing as a puppy dog for Biden at the Democrat Convention as a Democrat DNC executive, the re-alignment is almost complete: Globalist Nationalist Socialist Bolshevism versus American Populism, i.e. Elites versus Deplorables or Academics versus Smelly Wal-Mart people.

on target , 5 hours ago

No way. CIA up to their eyeballs in this as well as the State Department. Impossible for Russiagate or Ukrainegate without direct CIA and State involvement.

RightlyIndignent , 4 hours ago

Following Orders? How did that argument go at Nuremberg? (hint: not very well)

LeadPipeDreams , 6 hours ago

LOL - the CIA's main mission - despite their "official" charter, has always been to destabilize the US and its citizens via psyops, false flags, etc.

Covid-1984 is their latest and it appears most successful project yet.

Iconoclast27 , 5 hours ago

The CIA received a $200 million initial investment from the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations when it was first established, that should tell you everything you need to know how who they truly work for.

A_Huxley , 6 hours ago

CIA, MI6, 5 eye nations.

All wanted to sway the USA their own way.

Let it Go , 8 hours ago

Almost as frightening as the concentrated power held by companies such as Facebook and Google is the fact Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and the world's richest man, is the person who owns and controls the Washington Post. It is silly to think Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post in 2013 because he expected newspapers to make a lucrative resurgence.

It is more likely he purchased the long-trusted U.S. newspaper for the power it would ensure him in Washington when wielded as a propaganda mouthpiece to extend his ability to both shape and control public opinion. More on this subject in the article below.

https://Amazon, Jeff Bezos, And The Influential Washington Post_31.html

avoiceofliberty , 16 hours ago

The amazing thing about Binney's forensic analysis is that it has been around since 2018 .

It's also been clear since 2017 the hack of the DNC computers didn't hold up under scrutiny .

How it is the Democrats, the Deep State, and the legacy media are still able to cling to the remnants of these long discredited narratives is a mystery.

avoiceofliberty , 6 hours ago

At the official level, you have a point.

However, even before Mueller was appointed, a review of the materials in the extant public record of both the DNC "hack" and the history of Crowdstrike showed the narrative simply did not make sense. A detailed investigation of materials not made public was not necessary to shoot down the entire narrative.

Indeed, one of the great scandals of the Mueller probe is the way it did not bring prudential skepticism to the question of the DNC "hack". When building a case, either for public debate or for public trial, a dose of skepticism is healthy; it leads to a careful vetting of facts and reasoning.

Alice-the-dog , 6 hours ago

The CIA has been an agency wholly independent of the US government almost since its inception. It is not under any significant control by the government, and has its own agenda which may occasionally coincide with that of the government, but only coincidentally. It has its own view of how the world should look, and will not balk at any means necessary to achieve such. Including the murder of dis-favorable members of government.

snodgrass , 6 hours ago

It's the CIA and the FBI, Obama and people in his administration who cooked up Russiagate.

Floki_Ragnarsson , 7 hours ago

The CIA whacked JFK because he was going to slow the roll to Vietnam AND disband the CIA and reform it.

It is broken and needs to be disbanded and reformed along lines that actually WORK! The CIA missed the fall of the USSR, 9/11, etc. HTF does THAT happen?

DeportThemAll , 6 hours ago

The CIA didn't "miss" 9/11... they participated in it.

Let it Go , 8 hours ago

The CIA is a tool that when improperly used can do great damage.

Anyone who doesn't believe that countries use psychological warfare and propaganda to sway the opinions of people both in and outside of their country should be considered naive. Too many people America is more than a little hypocritical when they criticize other countries for trying to gain influence considering our history of meddling in the affairs of other countries.

Americans have every reason to be concerned and worried considering revelations of just how big the government intelligence agencies have grown since 9-11 and how unlimited their spying and surveillance operations have become. The article below explores this growth and questions whether we have lost control.

http://Psychological Warfare And Propaganda Out Of Control.html

tion , 16 hours ago

The idea of Binney and Jason Sullivan privately working to 'secure the vote' is something that I actually consider to be very eyebrow raising and alarming.

Son of Captain Nemo , 8 hours ago

Bill Binney under "B" in the only "yellow pages" that show a conscience and a soul!...

https://www.ae911truth.org/signatures/#/General/B/williambinneysevernMDUS

fliebinite , 9 hours ago

This is the dumbest article ever. Russiagate is a total fabrication of the FBI as per Clinesmith, CIA provided information that would have nipped it at the bud. Read the real news.

bringonthebigone , 9 hours ago

Wrong. this article is one small piece of the puzzle. Clinesmith is one small piece of the puzzle. The Flynn entrapment is one small piece of the puzzle. The Halper entrapment was one small piece of the puzzle.

Because Clinesmith at the FBI covered up the information saying Page was a CIA source does not mean it was a total FBI fabrication and does not mean the CIA was not involved and does not mean the DNC server hack is irrelevant.

Milley Weaver gets close in her recent video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HFxVvrXjCg

Sundance does a better job pulling it all together.

PKKA , 14 hours ago

Relations have already soured between Russia and the United States, and sanctions have been announced. Tensions have grown on the NATO-Russia border. The meat has already been rolled into the minced meat and it will not be possible to roll the minced meat back into the meat. The CIA got it. But the Russian people now absolutely understand that the United States will always be the enemy of Russia, no matter whether socialist or capitalist. But I like it even more than the feigned hypocritical "friendship". Russia has never reached such heights as during the good old Cold War. All Russians have a huge incentive, long live the new Cold War!

smacker , 12 hours ago

More and more people have worked out that the fabricated tensions between the US and Russia
and US and China have little to do with those two countries posing any sort of threat to world peace.

It is all about the US trying to remain in No.1 position as uni-polar top dog via the Anglo American Empire.
We see examples of this every day in the M/E, South China Sea, Taiwan, Libya all over Eastern Europe,
Ukraine, Iran and now Belaruse. HK was added along the way.

Both Russia and China openly want a multi-polar world order. But the US will never accept that.

Hence the prospect of war. The only unknown today is what and where the trigger will be.

smacker , 12 hours ago

More and more people have worked out that the fabricated tensions between the US and Russia
and US and China have little to do with those two countries posing any sort of threat to world peace.

It is all about the US trying to remain in No.1 position as uni-polar top dog via the Anglo American Empire.
We see examples of this every day in the M/E, South China Sea, Taiwan, Libya all over Eastern Europe,
Ukraine, Iran and now Belaruse. HK was added along the way.

Both Russia and China openly want a multi-polar world order. But the US will never accept that.

Hence the prospect of war. The only unknown today is what and where the trigger will be.

hang_the_banksters , 31 minutes ago

the best proof thAt Guccifer 2 was CIA hacking themselves to frame Wikileaks is this:

Guccifer has not yet been identified, indicted and arrested.

you'd think CIAFBINSA would be turning over every stone to the ends of the earth to bust Guccifer. we just had to endure 4 years of hysterical propaganda that Russia had hacked our election and that Trump was their secret agent. so Guccifer should be the Most Wanted Man on the planet. meanwhile, it's crickets from FBI. they arent even looking for him. because Guccifer is over at Langley. maybe someone outta ask Brennan where G2 is now.

remember when DOJ indicted all those GRU cybersoldiers? the evidence listed in the indictment was so stunning that i dont believe it. NSA so thoroughly hacked back into GRU that NSA was watching GRU through their own webcams and recording them doing Google searches to translate words which were written in Guccifer's blog posts about the DNC email leaks. NSA and DOJ must think we are all stupid, that we will believe NSA is so powerful to do that, yet they cant identify Guccifer.

i say i dont believe that for a second because no way Russian GRU are so stupid to even have webcams on the computers they use to hack, and it is absurd to think GRU soldiers on a Russian military base would be using Google instead of Yandex to translate words into English.

lay_arrow
ConanTheContrarian1 , 1 hour ago

As a confirmed conspiracy theorist since I came back from 'Nam, here's mine: The European nobility recognized with the American and French revolutions that they needed a better approach. They borrowed from the Tudors (who had to deal with Parliament) and began to rule by controlling the facade of representative government. This was enhanced by funding banks to control through currency, as well as blackmail and murder, and morphed into a complete propaganda machine like no other in history. The CIA, MI6 and Mossad, the mainstream media, deep plants in bureaucracy and "democratic" bodies all obey their dictates to create narratives that control our minds. Trump seems to offer hope, but remember, he could be their latest narrative.

greatdisconformity , 1 hour ago

A Democracy cannot function on a higher level than the general electorate.

The intelligence and education of the general electorate has been sliding for generations, because both political parties can play this to their advantage.

It is no accident that most of the messages coming from politicians are targeted to imbeciles.

[Aug 13, 2020] Today, Washington is saturated with China hawks. Unfortunately, andy voices that champion keeping America strong by avoiding conflict with China are reflexively smeared as "appeasement."

Aug 13, 2020 | nationalinterest.org

America's actions have already caused Beijing and Moscow to put aside historic enmity and increase its partnership on economic issues and increasingly frequent joint military drills . China and Iran recently completed the basics of an energy and military cooperation agreement. Moreover, President Xi Jinping has become increasingly effective at deepening ties with European, African, and Latin American states.

Today, Washington is saturated with China hawks. Unfortunately, andy voices that champion keeping America strong by avoiding conflict with China are reflexively smeared as "appeasement." I fear America may one day find out to its harm that rejecting sober diplomatic engagement, which could have extended its security and prosperity well into the future, was dismissed in favor of an unnecessary military-first tactic of coercing China.

Daniel L. Davis is a Senior Fellow for Defense Priorities and a former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army who retired in 2015 after twenty-one years, including four combat deployments. Follow him @DanielLDavis1.

[Aug 13, 2020] This Is Amerika - Where Fascism, Totalitarianism And Militarism Go Hand-In-Hand

Aug 12, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

"In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem."

- Ronald Reagan

There's a pattern emerging if you pay close enough attention.

Civil discontent leads to civil unrest, which leads to protests and counterprotests.

Without fail, what should be an exercise in how to peacefully disagree turns ugly the moment looting, vandalism, violence, intimidation tactics and rioting are introduced into the equation. Instead of restoring order, local police stand down.

Tensions rise, violence escalates, and federal armies move in.

Coincidence? I think not.

This was the blueprint used three years ago in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 , when the city regularly cited as being one of the happiest places in America , became ground zero for a heated war of words -- and actions -- over racism, " sanitizing history ," extremism (both right and left), political correctness, hate speech, partisan politics, and a growing fear that violent words will end in violent actions.

It was a setup : local police deliberately engineered a situation in which protesters would confront each other, tensions would bubble over, and things would turn just violent enough to call in the bigger guns.

It is the blueprint being used right now.

https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890

In Charlottesville, as in so many parts of the country right now, the conflict was over how to reconcile the nation's checkered past, particularly as it relates to slavery, with the push to sanitize the environment of anything -- words and images -- that might cause offense, especially if it's a Confederate flag or monument .

That fear of offense prompted the Charlottesville City Council to get rid of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that had graced one of its public parks for 82 years.

That's when everything went haywire.

In attempting to pacify one particularly vocal and righteously offended group while railroading over the concerns of those with alternate viewpoints, Charlottesville attracted the unwanted attention of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and the alt-Right, all of whom descended on the little college town with the intention of exercising their First Amendment right to be disagreeable, to assemble, and to protest.

When put to the test, Charlottesville did not handle things well at all.

On August 12, 2017, what should have been an exercise in free speech quickly became a brawl that left one dead and dozens more injured.

As the New York Times reported, "Protesters began to mace one another, throwing water bottles and urine-filled balloons -- some of which hit reporters -- and beating each other with flagpoles, clubs and makeshift weapons. Before long, the downtown area was a melee. People were ducking and covering with a constant stream of projectiles whizzing by our faces, and the air was filled with the sounds of fists and sticks against flesh."

And then there was the police, who were supposed to uphold the law and prevent violence.

They failed to do either.

Indeed, a 220-page post-mortem of the protests and the Charlottesville government's response by former U.S. attorney Timothy J. Heaphy merely corroborates our worst fears about what drives the government at all levels: power, money, ego, politics and ambition.

When presented with a situation in which the government and its agents were tasked with protecting free speech and safety, Heaphy concluded that " the City of Charlottesville protected neither free expression nor public safety ."

Heaphy continues:

"The City was unable to protect the right of free expression and facilitate the permit holder's offensive speech. This represents a failure of one of government's core functions -- the protection of fundamental rights. Law enforcement also failed to maintain order and protect citizens from harm, injury, and death. Charlottesville preserved neither of those principles on August 12, which has led to deep distrust of government within this community."

In other words, the government failed to uphold its constitutional mandates. The police failed to carry out their duties as peace officers. And the citizens found themselves unable to trust either the police or the government to do its job in respecting their rights and ensuring their safety.

Despite the fact that 1,000 first responders (including 300 state police troopers and members of the National Guard) -- many of whom had been preparing for the downtown rally for months -- had been called on to work the event, despite the fact that police in riot gear surrounded Emancipation Park on three sides, and despite the fact that Charlottesville had had what reporter David Graham referred to as " a dress rehearsal of sorts " a month earlier when 30 members of the Ku Klux Klan were confronted by 1000 counterprotesters, police failed to do their jobs.

In fact, as the Washington Post reports, police "seemed to watch as groups beat each other with sticks and bludgeoned one another with shields At one point, police appeared to retreat and then watch the beatings before eventually moving in to end the free-for-all, make arrests and tend to the injured."

" Police Stood By As Mayhem Mounted in Charlottesville ," reported ProPublica .

Instead of establishing clear boundaries -- buffer zones -- between the warring groups and protecting the First Amendment rights of the protesters, police established two entrances into the permit areas of the park and created barriers "guiding rallygoers single-file into the park" past lines of white nationalists and antifa counterprotesters .

Incredibly, when the first signs of open violence broke out, Heaphy reports that the police chief allegedly instructed his staff to " let them fight, it will make it easier to declare an unlawful assembly ."

This is not much different from what is happening on the present-day national scene.

Commissioned by the City of Charlottesville, this Heaphy report was intended to be an independent investigation of what went right and what went wrong in the government's handling of the protests.

Heaphy found very little to commend.

What went right on Aug. 12 according to Heaphy:

1) Despite the presence of firearms, including members of the militia, and angry confrontations between protesters and counterprotesters, no person was shot and no significant property damage occurred;

2) Emergency personnel did their jobs effectively and treated a large number of people in a short period of time; and

3) Police intelligence gathering was thorough (that's the best he had to say about police).

Now for what went wrong, according to the report:

1. Police failed to get input from other law enforcement agencies experienced in handling large protests.

2. Police failed to adequately train their officers in advance of the protest.

3. City officials failed to request assistance from outside agencies.

4. The City Council unduly interfered by ignoring legal advice, attempting to move the protesters elsewhere, and ignoring the concerns of law enforcement.

5. The city government failed to inform the public about their plans.

6. City officials were misguided in allowing weapons at the protest.

7. The police implemented a flawed operational plan that failed to protect public safety.

8. While police were provided with riot gear, they were never trained in how to use it, nor were they provided with any meaningful field training in how to deal with or de-escalate anticipated violence on the part of protesters.

9. Despite the input and advice of outside counsel, including The Rutherford Institute, the police failed to employ de-escalation tactics or establish clear barriers between warring factions of protesters.

10. Government officials and police leadership opted to advance their own agendas at the expense of constitutional rights and public safety.

11. For all intents and purposes, police abided by a stand down order that endangered the community and paved the way for massive civil unrest.

12. In failing to protect public safety, police and government officials undermined public faith in the government.

The Heaphy report focused on the events that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, but it applies to almost every branch of government that fails to serve "we the people."

As the Pew Research Center revealed, public trust in the government remains near historic lows and with good reason, too.

This isn't America, land of the free, where the government is "of the people, by the people [and] for the people."

Rather, this is Amerika, where fascism, totalitarianism and militarism go hand in hand.

What you smell is the stench of a dying republic. Our dying republic.

The American experiment in freedom is failing fast.

Through every fault of our own -- our apathy, our ignorance, our intolerance, our disinclination to do the hard work of holding government leaders accountable to the rule of law, our inclination to let politics trump longstanding constitutional principles -- we have been reduced to this sorry state in which we are little more than shackled inmates in a prison operated for the profit of a corporate elite.

We have been saddled with the wreckage of a government at all levels that no longer represents the citizenry, serves the citizenry, or is accountable to the citizenry.

"We the people" are not the masters anymore.

It doesn't matter whether you're talking about the federal government, state governments, or local governing bodies: at all ends of the spectrum and every point in between, a shift has taken place.

"We the people" are not being seen, heard or valued.

We no longer count for much of anything beyond an occasional electoral vote and as a source of income for the government's ever-burgeoning financial needs.

Everything happening at the national level is playing out at the local level, as well: the violence, the militarization, the intolerance, the lopsided governance, and an uneasy awareness that the citizenry have no say in how their communities are being governed.

As I have warned repeatedly, the architects of the police state have every intention of manipulating this outrage for their own purposes.

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Predictably, the police state is allowing these protests, riots and looting to devolve into a situation where enough of the voting populace is so desperate for a return to law and order that they will gladly relinquish some of their freedoms to achieve it. And that's how the police state will win, no matter which candidate gets elected to the White House, and "we the people" will continue to lose.

So what's the answer?

As always, it must start with "we the people."

I've always advised people to think nationally, but act locally.

Yet as Charlottesville made clear, it's hard to make a difference locally when the local government is as deaf, dumb and blind to the needs of its constituents as the national government.

Charlottesville much like the rest of the nation has had its fair share of government leaders who are tone-deaf, focused on their own aggrandizement, and incapable of prioritizing the needs of their constituents over their own personal and political agendas; law enforcement officials for whom personal safety, heavy-handed militarized tactics, and power plays trump their duty to serve and protect; polarized citizens incapable of finding common ground, respecting each other's rights, or agreeing to disagree; and a community held hostage by political correctness, divisive rhetoric and a growing intolerance for any views that may be unpopular or at odds with the mainstream.

It was a perfect storm just waiting for the right conditions to wreak havoc, a precursor of the rage, frustration and fear that is erupting all over the country.

No matter what forces are manipulating these present riots and violent uprisings, however -- and there are definitely such forces at play here -- none of this would be happening without the government having laid the groundwork.

Clearly, it's time to clean house at all levels of government.

Stop tolerating corruption, graft, intolerance, greed, incompetence, ineptitude, militarism, lawlessness, ignorance, brutality, deceit, collusion, corpulence, bureaucracy, immorality, depravity, censorship, cruelty, violence, mediocrity, and tyranny. These are the hallmarks of an institution that is rotten through and through.

Stop holding your nose in order to block out the stench of a rotting institution.

Stop letting the government and its agents treat you like a servant or a slave.

You've got rights. We've all got rights. This is our country. This is our government. No one can take it away from us unless we make it easy for them.

You've got a better chance of making your displeasure seen and felt and heard within your own community. But it will take perseverance and unity and a commitment to finding common ground with your fellow citizens.

Right now, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People , we're making it way too easy for the police state to take over.

Stop being an accessory to the murder of the American republic.

[Aug 12, 2020] Interview with Hassan Nasrallah providing insight into his tactical and strategic thinking processes w.r.t the conflict with Israel

Aug 12, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Arch Bungle , Aug 11 2020 15:52 utc | 88

Incredible interview with Hassan Nasrallah ("The Old Man of The Mountain" as I think of him) providing insight into his tactical and strategic thinking processes w.r.t the conflict with Israel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_xJ1jb3r74

Probably excellent material for textbooks on asymmetric warfare ...

[Aug 09, 2020] Do some research and you will find Hilary and her husband worked for Pappy Bush

Apr 18, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

From comments to Trump Campaign Time To Go After 'Liars' Who Started Witch Hunt Zero Hedge

stephysat28 , 8 hours ago link

Do some research it becomes clear quickly what the real story is. Hillary and her bunch stink to high heaven and have or YEARS. Started with her and husband. They sold this country o or personal gain.Just search a little and make sure to use factual information. It is there for anyone to find.

oddjob , 8 hours ago link

Do some research and you will find Hilary and her husband worked for Pappy Bush

[Aug 09, 2020] How the CIA Made Afghanistan Safe for the Opium Trade by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Jul 10, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

"I decided I could live with that."

– Stansfield Turner, Jimmy Carter's CIA director, on the extreme level of civilian casualties in the CIA's covert war in Afghanistan.

The first indelible image of the war in Afghanistan for many Americans was probably that of CBS anchorman Dan Rather, wrapped in the voluminous drapery of a mujahedin fighter, looking like a healthy relative of Lawrence of Arabia (albeit with hair that seemed freshly blow-dried, as some viewers were quick to point out). From his secret mountainside "somewhere in the Hindu Kush," Rather unloaded on his audience a barrowload of nonsense about the conflict. The Soviets, Rather confided portentously, had put a bounty on his head "of many thousands of dollars." He went on, "It was the best compliment they could have given me. And having a price put on my head was a small price to pay for the truths we told about Afghanistan."

Every one of these observations turned out to be entirely false. Rather described the government of Hafizullah Amin as a "Moscow-installed puppet regime in Kabul." But Amin had closer ties to the CIA than he did to the KGB. Rather called the mujahedin the "Afghan freedom fighters who were engaged in a deeply patriotic fight to the death for home and hearth." The mujahedin were scarcely fighting for freedom, in any sense Rather would have been comfortable with, but instead to impose one of the most repressive brands of Islamic fundamentalism known to the world, barbarous, ignorant and notably cruel to women.

It was a "fact," Rather announced, that the Soviets had used chemical weapons against Afghan villagers. This was a claim promoted by the Reagan administration, which charged that the extraordinarily precise number of 3,042 Afghans had been killed by this yellow chemical rain, a substance that had won glorious propaganda victories in its manifestation in Laos a few years earlier, when the yellow rain turned out to be bee feces heavily loaded with pollen. As Frank Brodhead put it in the London Guardian, "Its composition: one part bee feces, plus many parts State Department disinformation mixed with media gullibility."

Rather claimed that the mujahedin were severely underequipped, doing their best with Kalashnikov rifles taken from dead Soviet soldiers. In fact the mujahedin were extremely well-equipped, being the recipients of CIA-furnished weapons in the most " "expensive covert war the Agency had ever mounted. They did carry Soviet weapons, but they came courtesy of the CIA. Rather also showed news footage that he claimed was of Soviet bombers strafing defenseless Afghan villages. This footage was staged, with the "Soviet bomber" actually a Pakistani air force plane on a training mission over northwest Pakistan.

CBS claimed to have discovered in Soviet-bombed areas stuffed animals filled with Soviet explosives, designed to blow Afghan children to bits. These booby-trapped toys had in fact been manufactured by the mujahedin for the exclusive purpose of gulling CBS News, as an entertaining article in the New York Post later made clear.

Rather made his heroically filmed way to Yunas Khalis, described as the leader of the Afghan warriors. In tones of awe he normally reserves for hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, Rather recalls in his book, The Camera Never Blinks Twice , "Belief in 'right' makes 'might' may have been fading in other parts of the world. In Afghanistan it was alive and well, and beating the Soviets." Khalis was a ruthless butcher, with his troops fondly boasting of their slaughter of 700 prisoners of war. He spent most of his time fighting, but the wars were not primarily with the Soviets. Instead, Khalis battled other Afghan rebel groups, the object of the conflicts being control of poppy fields and the roads and trails from them to his seven heroin labs near his headquarters in the town of Ribat al Ali. Sixty percent of Afghanistan's opium crop was cultivated in the Helmand Valley, with an irrigation infrastructure underwritten by USAID.

In his dispatches from the front Rather did mention the local opium trade, but in a remarkably disingenuous fashion. "Afghans," he said, "had turned Darra into a boom town, selling their home-grown opium for the best available weapons, then going back into Afghanistan to fight."

Now Darra is a town in northwest Pakistan where the CIA had set up a factory to manufacture Soviet-style weapons that it was giving away to all Afghan comers. The weapons factory was run under contract to Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI). Much of the opium trucked into Darra from Afghanistan by the mujahedin was sold to the Pakistani governor of the northwest territory, Lieutenant General Fazle Huq. From this opium the heroin was refined in labs in Darra, placed on Pakistani army trucks and transported to Karachi, then shipped to Europe and the United States.

Rather belittled the Carter administration's reaction to the Soviet-backed coup in 1979, charging that Carter's response had been tepid and slow in coming. In fact, President Carter had reacted with a range of moves that should have been the envy of the Reagan hawks who, a couple of years later, were belaboring him for being a Cold War wimp. Not only did Carter withdraw the United States from the 1980 Olympics, he slashed grain sales to the Soviet Union, to the great distress of Midwestern farmers; put the SALT II treaty hold; pledged to increase the US defense budget by 5 percent a year until the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan; and unveiled the Carter doctrine of containment in southern Asia, which CIA historian John Ranelagh says led Carter to approve "more secret CIA operations than Reagan later did."

Carter later confessed in his memoirs that he was more shaken by the invasion of Afghanistan than any other event of his presidency, including the Iranian revolution. Carter was convinced by the CIA that it could be the start of a push by the Soviets toward the Persian Gulf, a scenario that led the president to seriously consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

Three weeks after Soviet tanks rolled into Kabul, Carter's secretary of defense, Harold Brown, was in Beijing, arranging for a weapons transfer from the Chinese to the CIA-backed Afghani troops mustered in Pakistan. The Chinese, who were generously compensated for the deal, agreed and even consented to send military advisers. Brown worked out a similar arrangement with Egypt to buy $15 million worth of weapons. "The US contacted me," Anwar Sadat recalled shortly before his assassination. "They told me, 'Please open your stores for us so that we can give the Afghans the armaments they need to fight.' And I gave them the armaments. The transport of arms to the Afghans started from Cairo on US planes."

But few in the Carter administration believed the rebels had any chance of toppling the Soviets. Under most scenarios, the war seemed destined to be a slaughter, with civilians and the rebels paying a heavy price. The objective of the Carter doctrine was more cynical. It was to bleed the Soviets, hoping to entrap them in a Vietnam-style quagmire. The high level of civilian casualties didn't faze the architects of covert American intervention. "I decided I could live with that," recalled Carter's CIA director Stansfield Turner.

Prior to the Soviet invasion, Afghanistan barely registered as a topic of interest for the national press, surfacing in only a handful of annual newspaper stories. In December 1973, when détente was near its zenith, the Wall Street Journal ran a rare front-page story on the country, titled "Do the Russians Covet Afghanistan? If so, It's Hard to Figure Why." Reporter Peter Kann, later to become the Journal's chairman and publisher, wrote that "great power strategists tend to think of Afghanistan as a kind of fulcrum upon which the world balance of power tips. But from close up, Afghanistan tends to look less like a fulcrum or a domino or a steppingstone than like a vast expanse of desert waste with a few fly-ridden bazaars, a fair number of feuding tribes and a lot of miserably poor people."

After the Soviet Union invaded, this wasteland swiftly acquired the status of a precious geopolitical prize. A Journal editorial following the Soviet takeover said Afghanistan was "more serious than a mere stepping-stone" and, in response, called for stationing of US troops in the Middle East, increased military outlays, expanded covert operations and reinstatement of draft registration. Drew Middleton, then a New York Times Defense Department correspondent, filed a tremulous post-invasion analysis in January 1980: "The conventional wisdom in the Pentagon," he wrote, "is that in purely military terms, the Russians are in a far better position vis-à-vis the United States than Hitler was against Britain and France in 1939."

The Pentagon and CIA agitprop machine went into high gear: on January 3, 1980, George Wilson of the Washington Post reported that military leaders hoped the invasion would "help cure the Vietnam "never again' hangover of the American public." Newsweek said the "Soviet thrust" represented "a severe threat" to US interests: "Control of Afghanistan would put the Russians within 350 miles of the Arabian Sea, the oil lifeline of the West and Japan. Soviet warplanes based in Afghanistan could cut the lifeline at will." The New York Times endorsed Carter's call for increased military spending and supported the Cruise and Trident missile programs, "faster research on the MX or some other mobile land missile," and the creation of a rapid deployment force for Third World intervention, calling the latter an "investment in diplomacy."

In sum, Afghanistan proved to be a glorious campaign for both the CIA and Defense Department, a dazzling offensive in which waves of credulous and compliant journalists were dispatched to promulgate the ludicrous proposition that the United States was under military threat. By the time Reagan assumed office, he and his CIA director William Casey saw support for their own stepped-up Afghan plan from an unlikely source, the Democrat-controlled Congress, which was pushing to double spending on the war. "It was a windfall [for the Reagan administration]," a congressional staffer told the Washington Post. "They'd faced so much opposition to covert action in Central America and here comes the Congress helping and throwing money at them, putting money their way and they say, 'Who are we to say no?' "

As the CIA increased its backing of the mujahedin (the CIA budget for Afghanistan finally reached $3.2 billion, the most expensive secret operation in its history) a White House member of the president's Strategic Council on Drug Abuse, David Musto, informed the administration that the decision to arm the mujahedin would misfire: "I told the Council that we were going into Afghanistan to support the opium growers in their rebellion against the Soviets. Shouldn't we try to avoid what we'd done in Laos? Shouldn't we try to pay the growers if they will eradicate their opium production? There was silence."

After issuing this warning, Musto and a colleague on the council, Joyce Lowinson, continued to question US policy, but found their queries blocked by the CIA and the State Department. Frustrated, they then turned to the New York Times op-ed page and wrote, on May 22, 1980: "We worry about the growing of opium in Afghanistan or Pakistan by rebel tribesmen who apparently are the chief adversaries of the Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Are we erring in befriending these tribes as we did in Laos when Air America (chartered by the Central Intelligence Agency) helped transport crude opium from certain tribal areas?" But Musto and Lowinson met with silence once again, not only from the administration but from the press. It was heresy to question covert intervention in Afghanistan.

Later in 1980, Hoag Levins, a writer for Philadelphia Magazine, interviewed a man he identified as a "high level" law enforcement official in the Carter administration's Justice Department and quoted him thus: "You have the administration tiptoeing around this like it's a land mine. The issue of opium and heroin in Afghanistan is explosive In the State of the Union speech, the president mentioned drug abuse but he was very careful to avoid mentioning Afghanistan, even though Afghanistan is where things are really happening right now Why aren't we taking a more critical look at the arms we are now shipping into gangs of drug runners who are obviously going to use them to increase the efficiency of their drug-smuggling operation?"

The DEA was well aware that the mujahedin rebels were deeply involved in the opium trade. The drug agency's reports in 1980 showed that Afghan rebel incursions from their Pakistan bases into Soviet-held positions were "determined in part by opium planting and harvest seasons." The numbers were stark and forbidding. Afghan opium production tripled between 1979 and 1982. There was evidence that by 1981 the Afghan heroin producers had captured 60 percent of the heroin market in Western Europe and the United States (these are UN and DEA figures).

In 1971, during the height of the CIA's involvement in Laos, there were about 500,000 heroin addicts in the United States. By the mid- to late 1970s this total had fallen to 200,000. But in 1981 with the new flood of Afghan heroin and consequent low prices, the heroin addict population rose to 450,000. In New York City in 1979 alone (the year that the flow of arms to the mujahedin began), heroin-related drug deaths increased by 77 percent. The only publicly acknowledged US casualties on the Afghan battlefields were some Black Muslims who journeyed to the Hindu Kush from the United States to fight on the Prophet's behalf. But the drug casualties inside the US from the secret CIA war, particularly in the inner cities, numbered in the thousands, plus untold social blight and suffering.

Since the seventeenth century opium poppies have been grown in the so-called Golden Crescent, where the highlands of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran all converge. For nearly four centuries this was an internal market. By the 1950s very little opium was produced in either Afghanistan or Pakistan, with perhaps 2,500 acres in these two countries under cultivation. The fertile growing fields of Afghanistan's Helmand Valley, by the 1980s under intensive opium poppy cultivation, were covered with vineyards, wheat fields and cotton plantations.

In Iran, the situation was markedly different in the early 1950s. The country, dominated by British and US oil companies and intelligence agencies, was producing 600 tons of opium a year and had 1.3 million opium addicts, second only to China where, at the same moment, the western opium imperialists still held sway. Then, in 1953, Mohammed Mossadegh, Iran's nationalist equivalent of China's Sun Yat-sen, won elections and immediately moved to suppress the opium trade. Within a few weeks, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was calling Mossadegh a madman, and Dulles's brother Allen, head of the CIA, dispatched Kermit Roosevelt to organize a coup against him. In August 1953 Mossadegh was overthrown, the Shah was installed by the CIA, and the oil and opium fields of Iran were once again in friendly hands. Production continued unabated until the assumption of power in 1979 of the Ayatollah Khomeini, at which point Iran had a very serious opium problem in terms of the addiction of its own population. Unlike the mujahedin chieftains, the Ayatollah was a strict constructionist of Islamic law on the matter of intoxicants: addicts and dealers faced the death penalty. Opium production in Iran dropped drastically.

In Afghanistan in the 1950s and 1960s, the relatively sparse opium trade was controlled by the royal family, headed by King Mohammed Zahir, The large feudal estates all had their opium fields, primarily to feed domestic consumption of the drug. In April 1978 a populist coup overthrew the regime of Mohammed Daoud, who had formed an alliance with the Shah of Iran. The Shah had shoveled money in Daoud's direction – $2 billion on one report – and the Iranian secret police, the Savak, were imported to train Daoud's internal security force. The new Afghan government was led by Noor Mohammed Taraki. The Taraki administration moved toward land reform, hence an attack on the opium-growing feudal estates. Taraki went to the UN, where he requested and received loans for crop substitution for the poppy fields.

Taraki also pressed hard against opium production in the border areas held by fundamentalists, since the latter were using opium revenues to finance attacks on the Afghan central government, which they regarded as an unwholesome incarnation of modernity that allowed women to go to school and outlawed arranged marriages and the bride price.

By the spring of 1979 the character of Dan Rather's heroes, the mujahedin, was also beginning to emerge. The Washington Post reported that the mujahedin liked to "torture their victims by first cutting off their noses, ears and genitals, then removing one slice of skin after another." Over that year the mujahedin evinced particular animosity toward westerners, killing six West Germans and a Canadian tourist and severely beating a US military attaché. It's also ironic that in that year the mujahedin were getting money not only from the CIA but from Libya's Moammar Qaddaffi, who sent $250,000 in their direction.

In the summer of 1979, over six months before the Soviets moved in, the US State Department produced a memorandum making clear how it saw the stakes, no matter how modern-minded Taraki might be, or how feudal the mujahedin: "The United States' larger interest would be served by the demise of the Taraki-Amin regime, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan." The report continued, "The overthrow of the DRA [Democratic Republic of Afghanistan] would show the rest of the world, particularly the Third World, that the Soviets' view of the socialist course of history as being inevitable is not accurate."

Hard pressed by conservative forces in Afghanistan, Taraki appealed to the Soviets for help, which they declined to furnish on the grounds that this was exactly what their mutual enemies were waiting for.

In September 1979 Taraki was killed in a coup organized by Afghan military officers. Hafizullah Amin was installed as president. He had impeccable western credentials, having been to Columbia University in New York and the University of Wisconsin. Amin had served as the president of the Afghan Students Association, which had been funded by the Asia Foundation, a CIA pass-through group, or front. After the coup Amin began meeting regularly with US Embassy officials at a time when the US was arming Islamic rebels in Pakistan. Fearing a fundamentalist, US-backed regime pressing against its own border, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in force on December 27, 1979.

Then began the Carter-initiated CIA buildup that so worried White House drug expert David Musto. In a replication of what happened following the CIA-backed coup in Iran, the feudal estates were soon back in opium production and the crop-substitution program ended.

Because Pakistan had a nuclear program, the US had a foreign aid ban on the country. This was soon lifted it as the waging of a proxy war in Afghanistan became prime policy. In fairly short order, without any discernible slowdown in its nuclear program, Pakistan became the third largest recipient of US aid worldwide, right behind Israel and Egypt. Arms poured into Karachi from the US and were shipped up to Peshawar by the National Logistics Cell, a military unit controlled by Pakistan's secret police, the ISI. From Peshawar those guns that weren't simply sold to any and all customers (the Iranians got 16 Stinger missiles, one of which was used against a US helicopter in the Gulf) were divvied out by the ISI to the Afghan factions.

Though the US press, Dan Rather to the fore, portrayed the mujahedin as a unified force of freedom fighters, the fact (unsurprising to anyone with an inkling of Afghan history) was that the mujahedin consisted of at least seven warring factions, all battling for territory and control of the opium trade. The ISI gave the bulk of the arms – at one count 60 percent – to a particularly fanatical fundamentalist and woman-hater Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who made his public debut at the University of Kabul by killing a leftist student. In 1972 Hekmatyar fled to Pakistan, where he became an agent of the ISI. He urged his followers to throw acid in the faces of women not wearing the veil, kidnapped rival leaders, and built up his CIA-furnished arsenal against the day the Soviets would leave and the war for the mastery of Afghanistan would truly break out.

Using his weapons to get control of the opium fields, Hekmatyar and his men would urge the peasants, at gun point, to increase production. They would collect the raw opium and bring it back to Hekmatyar's six heroin factories in the town of Koh-i-Soltan

One of Hekmatyar's chief rivals in the mujahedin, Mullah Nassim, controlled the opium poppy fields in the Helmand Valley, producing 260 tons of opium a year. His brother, Mohammed Rasul, defended this agricultural enterprise by stating, "We must grow and sell opium to fight our holy war against the Russian nonbelievers." Despite this well-calculated pronouncement, they spent almost all their time fighting their fellow-believers, using the weapons sent them by the CIA to try to win the advantage in these internecine struggles. In 1989 Hekmatyar launched an assault against Nassim, attempting to take control of the Helmand Valley. Nassim fought him off, but a few months later Hekmatyar successfully engineered Nassim's assassination when he was holding the post of deputy defense minister in the provisional post-Soviet Afghan government. Hekmatyar now controlled opium growing in the Helmand Valley.

American DEA agents were fully apprised of the drug running of the mujahedin in concert with Pakistani intelligence and military leaders. In 1983 the DEA's congressional liaison, David Melocik, told a congressional committee, "You can say the rebels make their money off the sale of opium. There's no doubt about it. These rebels keep their cause going through the sale of opium." But talk about "the cause" depending on drug sales was nonsense at that particular moment. The CIA was paying for everything regardless. The opium revenues were ending up in offshore accounts in the Habib Bank, one of Pakistan's largest, and in the accounts of BCCI, founded by Agha Hasan Abedi, who began his banking career at Habib. The CIA was simultaneously using BCCI for its own secret transactions.

The DEA had evidence of over forty heroin syndicates operating in Pakistan in the mid-1980s during the Afghan war, and there was evidence of more than 200 heroin labs operating in northwest Pakistan. Even though Islamabad houses one of the largest DEA offices in Asia, no action was ever taken by the DEA agents against any of these operations. An Interpol officer told the journalist Lawrence Lifschultz, "It is very strange that the Americans, with the size of their resources, and political power they possess in Pakistan, have failed to break a single case. The explanation cannot be found in a lack of adequate police work. They have had some excellent men working in Pakistan." But working in the same offices as those DEA agents were five CIA officers who, so one of the DEA agents later told the Washington Post, ordered them to pull back their operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan for the duration of the war.

Those DEA agents were well aware of the drug-tainted profile of a firm the CIA was using to funnel cash to the mujahedin, namely Shakarchi Trading Company. This Lebanese-owned company had been the subject of a long-running DEA investigation into money laundering. One of Shakarchi's chief clients was Yasir Musullulu, who had once been nabbed attempting to deliver an 8.5-ton shipment of Afghan opium to members of the Gambino crime syndicate in New York City. A DEA memo noted that Shakarchi mingled "the currency of heroin, morphine base, and hashish traffickers with that of jewelers buying gold on the black market and Middle Eastern arms traffickers."

In May 1984 Vice President George Bush journeyed to Pakistan to confer with General Zia al Huq and other ranking members of the Pakistani regime. At the time, Bush was the head of President Reagan's National Narcotics Border Interdiction System. In this latter function, one of Bush's first moves was to expand the role of the CIA in drug operations. He gave the Agency primary responsibility in the use of, and control over, drug informants. The operational head of this task force was retired Admiral Daniel J. Murphy.

Murphy pushed for access to intelligence on drug syndicates but complained that the CIA was forever dragging its feet. "I didn't win," he said later to the New York Times. "I didn't get as much effective participation from the CIA as I wanted." Another member of the task force put it more bluntly, "The CIA could be of value, but you need a change of values and attitude. I don't know of a single thing they've ever given us that was useful."

Bush certainly knew well that Pakistan had become the source for most of the high-grade heroin entering Western Europe and the United States and that the generals with whom he was consorting were deeply involved in the drug trade. But the vice president, who proclaimed later that "I will never bargain with drug dealers on US or foreign soil," used his journey to Pakistan to praise the Zia regime for its unflinching support for the War on Drugs. (Amid such rhetorical excursions he did find time, it has to be said, to extract from Zia a contract to buy $40 million worth of gas turbines made by the General Electric Co.)

Predictably, through the 1980s the Reagan and Bush administrations went to great lengths to pin the blame for the upswing in Pakistani heroin production on the Soviet generals in Kabul. "The regime maintains an absolute indifference to any measures to control poppy," Reagan's attorney general Edwin Meese declared during a visit to Islamabad in March 1986. "We strongly believe that there is actually encouragement, at least tacitly, over growing opium poppy."

Meese knew better. His own Justice Department had been tracking the import of drugs from Pakistan since at least 1982 and was well aware that the trade was controlled by Afghan rebels and the Pakistani military. A few months after Meese's speech in Pakistan, the US Customs Office nabbed a Pakistani man named Abdul Wali as he tried to unload more than a ton of hash and a smaller amount of heroin into the United

States at Port Newark, New Jersey. The Justice Department informed the press that Wali headed a 50,000-member organization in northwest Pakistan – but Deputy Attorney General Claudia Flynn refused to reveal the group's identity. Another federal official told the Associated Press that Wali was a top leader of the mujahedin.

It was also known to US officials that people on intimate terms with President Zia were making fortunes in the opium trade. The word "fortune" here is no exaggeration, since one such Zia associate had $3 billion in his BCCI accounts. In 1983, a year before George Bush's visit to Pakistan, one of President Zia's doctors, a Japanese herbalist named Hisayoshi Maruyama was arrested in Amsterdam packing 17.5 kilos of high-grade heroin manufactured in Pakistan out of Afghan opium. At the time of his arrest he was disguised as a boy scout.

Interrogated by DEA agents after his arrest, Maruyama said that he was just a courier for Mirza Iqbal Baig, a man whom Pakistani customs agents described as "the most active dope dealer in the country." Baig was on close terms with the Zia family and other ranking officials in the government. He had twice been a target of the DEA, whose agents were told not to pursue investigations of him because of his ties to the Zia government. A top Pakistani lawyer, Said Sani Ahmed, told the BBC that this was standard procedure in Pakistan: "We may have evidence against a particular individual, but still our law-enforcing agencies cannot lay hands on such people, because they are forbidden to act by their superiors. The real culprits have enough money and resources. Frankly, they are enjoying some sort of immunity."

Baig was one of the tycoons of the Pakistani city of Lahore, owning cinemas, shopping centers, factories and a textile mill. He wasn't indicted on drug charges until 1992, after the fall of the Zia regime, when a US federal court in Brooklyn indicted him for heroin trafficking. The US finally exerted enough pressure on Pakistan to have him arrested in 1993; as of the spring of 1998 he was in prison in Pakistan.

One of Baig's partners (as described in Newsweek) in his drug business was Haji Ayub Afridi, a close ally of President Zia, who had served in the Pakistani General Assembly. Afridi lives thirty-five miles outside Peshawar in a large compound sealed off by 20-foot-high walls topped with concertina-wire and with defenses including an anti-aircraft battery and a private army of tribesmen. Afridi was said to be in charge of purchasing raw opium from the Afghan drug lords, while Baig looked after logistics and shipping to Europe and the United States. In 1993 Afridi was alleged to have put out a contract on the life of a DEA agent working in Pakistan.

Another case close to the Zia government involved the arrest on drug charges of Hamid Hasnain, the vice president of Pakistan's largest financial house, the Habib Bank. Hasnain's arrest became the centerpiece of a scandal known as the "Pakistani League affair." The drug ring was investigated by a dogged Norwegian investigator named Olyvind Olsen. On December 13, 1983 Norwegian police seized 3.5 kilos of heroin at Oslo airport in the luggage of a Pakistani named Raza Qureishi. In exchange for a reduced sentence Qureishi agreed to name his suppliers to Olsen, the narcotics investigator. Shortly after his interview with Qureishi, Olsen flew to Islamabad to ferret out the other members of the heroin syndicate. For more than a year Olsen pressured Pakistan's Federal Investigate Agency (FIA) to arrest the three men Qureishi had fingered: Tahir Butt, Munawaar Hussain, and Hasnain. All were associates of Baig and Zia. It wasn't until Olsen threatened to publicly condemn the FIA's conduct that the Agency took any action: finally, on October 25, 1985 the FIA arrested the three men. When the Pakistani agents picked up Hasnain they were assailed with a barrage of threats. Hasnain spoke of "dire consequences" and claimed to be "like a son" to President Zia. Inside Hasnain's suitcase FIA agents discovered records of the ample bank accounts of President Zia plus those of Zia's wife and daughter.

Immediately after learning of Hasnain's arrest, Zia's wife, who was in Egypt at the time, telephoned the head of the FIA. The president's wife imperiously demanded the release of her family's "personal banker." It turned out that Hasnain not only attended to the secret financial affairs of the presidential family, but also of the senior Pakistani generals, who were skimming money off the arms imports from the CIA and making millions from the opium traffic. A few days after his wife's call, President Zia himself was on the phone to the FIA, demanding that the investigators explain the circumstances surrounding Hasnain's arrest. Zia soon arranged for Hasnain to be released on bail pending trial. When Qureishi, the courier, took the stand to testify against Hasnain, the banker and his co-defendant hurled death threats against the witness in open court, prompting a protest from the Norwegian investigator, who threatened to withdraw from the proceedings.

Eventually the judge in the case clamped down, revoking Hasnain's bail and handing him a stiff prison term after his conviction. But Hasnain was just a relatively small fish who went to prison while guilty generals went free. "He's been made a scapegoat," Munir Bhatti told journalist Lawrence Lifschultz, "The CIA spoiled the case. The evidence was distorted. There was no justification in letting off the actual culprits who include senior personalities in this country. There was evidence in this case identifying such people."

Such were the men to whom the CIA was paying $3.2 billion a year to run the Afghan war, and no person better epitomizes this relationship than Lieutenant General Fazle Huq, who oversaw military operations in northwest Pakistan for General Zia, including the arming of the mujahedin who were using the region as a staging area for their raids. It was Huq who ensured that his ally Hekmatyar received the bulk of the CIA arms shipments, and it was also Huq who oversaw and protected the operations of the 200 heroin labs within his jurisdiction. Huq had been identified in 1982 by Interpol as a key player in the Afghan-Pakistani opium trade. The Pakistani opposition leaders referred to Huq as Pakistani's Noriega. He had been protected from drug investigations by Zia and the CIA and later boasted that with these connections he could get away "with blue murder."

Like other narco-generals in the Zia regime, Huq was also on close terms with Agha Hassan Abedi, the head of the BCCI. Abedi, Huq and Zia would dine together nearly every month, and conferred several times with Reagan's CIA director William Casey. Huq had a BCCI account worth $3 million. After Zia was assassinated in 1988 by a bomb planted (probably by senior military officers) in his presidential plane, Huq lost some of his official protection, and he was soon arrested for ordering the murder of a Shi'ite cleric.

After Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was deposed, her replacement Ishaq Khan swiftly released Huq from prison. In 1991 Huq was shot to death, probably in revenge for the cleric's death. The opium general was given a state funeral, where he was eulogized by Ishaq Khan as "a great soldier and competent administrator who played a commendable role in Pakistan's national progress."

Benazir Bhutto had swept to power in 1988 amid fierce vows to clean up Pakistan's drug-sodden corruption, but it wasn't long "before her own regime became the focus of serious charges. In 1989 the US Drug Enforcement Agency came across information that Benazir's husband, Asif Ali Zardari, may have been financing large shipments of heroin from Pakistan to Great Britain and the United States. The DEA assigned one of its agents, a man named John Banks, to work undercover in Pakistan. Banks was a former British mercenary who had worked undercover for Scotland Yard in big international drug cases.

While in Pakistan, Banks claims he posed as a member of the Mafia and that he had met with Bhutto and her husband at their home in Sind. Banks further claims that he traveled with Zadari to Islamabad, where he secretly recorded five hours of conversation between Zadari, a Pakistani air force general and a Pakistani banker. The men discussed the logistics of transporting heroin to the US and to Britain: "We talked about how they were going to ship the drugs to America in a metal cutter," Banks said in 1996. "They told me that the United Kingdom was another area where they had shipped heroin and hashish on a regular basis." The British Customs Office had also been monitoring Zadari for dope running: "We received intelligence from about three or four sources, about his alleged involvement as a financier," a retired British customs officer told the Financial Times. "This was all reported to British intelligence." The customs official says his government failed to act on this report. Similarly, Banks asserts that the CIA halted the DEA's investigation of Zardari. All this emerged when Bhutto's government fell for the second time, in 1996, on charges of corruption lodged primarily against Zardari, who is now in prison for his role in the murder of his brother-in-law Murtaza. Zardari also stands accused of embezzling more than $1 billion in government funds."

In 1991 Nawz Sharif says that while he served as prime minister he was approached by two Pakistani generals – Aslam Beg, chief of staff for the army, and Asad Durrani, head of the ISI – with a plan to fund dozens of covert operations through the sale of heroin. "General Durrani told me, 'We have a blueprint ready for your approval,' Sharif explained to Washington Post reporter John Ward Anderson in 1994. "I was totally flabbergasted. Both Beg and Durrani insisted that Pakistan's name would not be cited at any place because the whole operation would be carried out by trustworthy third parties. Durrani then went on to list a series of covert military operations in desperate need of money." Sharif said that he rejected the plan, but believes it was put in place when Bhutto resumed power.

The impact of the Afghan war on Pakistan's addiction rates was even more drastic than the surge in heroin addiction in the US and Europe. Before the CIA program began, there were fewer than 5,000 heroin addicts in Pakistan. By 1996, according to the United Nations, there were more than 1.6 million. The Pakistani representative to the UN Commission on Narcotics, Raoolf Ali Khan, said in 1993 that "there is no branch of government where drug corruption doesn't pervade." As an example he pointed to the fact that Pakistan spends only $1.8 million a year on anti-drug efforts, with an allotment of $1,000 to purchase gasoline for its seven trucks.

By 1994 the value of the heroin trade in Pakistan was twice the amount of the government's budget. A Western diplomat told the Washington Post in that year that "when you get to the stage where narco-traffickers have more money than the government it's going to take remarkable efforts and remarkable people to turn it around." The magnitude of commitment required is illustrated by two episodes. In 1991 the largest drug bust in world history occurred on the road

from Peshawar to Karachi. Pakistani customs officers seized 3.5 tons of heroin and 44 tons of hashish. Several days later half the hashish and heroin had vanished along with the witnesses. The suspects, four men with ties to Pakistani intelligence, had "mysteriously escaped," to use the words of a Pakistani customs officer. In 1993 Pakistani border guards seized 8 tons of hashish and 1.7 tons of heroin. When the case was turned over to the Pakistani narcotics control board, the entire staff went on vacation to avoid being involved in the investigation. No one was disciplined or otherwise inconvenienced and the narco-traffickers got off scot free. Even the CIA was eventually forced to admit in a 1994 report to Congress that heroin had become the "life blood of the Pakistani economy and political system."

In February 1989 Mikhail Gorbachev pulled the Soviet troops out of Afghanistan, and asked the US to agree to an embargo on the provision of weapons to any of the Afghan mujahedin factions, who were preparing for another phase of internecine war for control of the country. President Bush refused, thus ensuring a period of continued misery and horror for most Afghans. The war had already turned half the population into refugees, and seen 3 million wounded and more than a million killed. The proclivities of the mujahedin at this point are illustrated by a couple of anecdotes. The Kabul correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review reported in 1989 the mujahedin's treatment of Soviet prisoners: "One group was killed, skinned and hung up in a butcher's shop. One captive found himself the center of attraction in a game of buzkashi, that rough-and-tumble form of Afghan polo in which a headless goat is usually the ball. The captive was used instead. Alive. He was literally torn to pieces." The CIA also had evidence that its freedom fighters had doped up more than 200 Soviet soldiers with heroin and locked them in animal cages where, the Washington Post reported in 1990, they led "lives of indescribable horror."

In September 1996 the Taliban, fundamentalists nurtured originally in Pakistan as creatures of both the ISI and the CIA, seized power in Kabul, whereupon Mullah Omar, their leader, announced that all laws inconsistent with the Muslim Sharia would be changed. Women would be forced to assume the chador and remain at home, with total segregation of the sexes and women kept out of hospitals, schools and public bathrooms. The CIA continued to support these medieval fanatics who, according to Emma Bonino, the European Union's commissioner for humanitarian affairs, were committing "gender genocide."

One law at odds with the Sharia that the Taliban had no apparent interest in changing was the prophet's injunction against intoxicants. In fact, the Taliban urged its Afghan farmers to increase their production of opium. One of the Taliban leaders, the "drug czar" Abdul Rashid, noted, "If we try to stop this [opium farming] the people will be against us." By the end 1996, according to the UN, Afghan opium production had reached 2,000 metric tons. There were an estimated 200,000 families in Afghanistan working in the opium trade. The Taliban were in control of the 96 percent of all Afghan land in opium cultivation and imposed a tax on opium production and a road toll on trucks carrying the crop.

In 1997 an Afghan opium farmer gave an ironic reply to Jimmy Carter's brooding on whether to use nuclear weapons as part of a response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Amhud Gul told a reporter from the Washington Post, "We are cultivating this [that is, opium] and exporting this as an atom bomb." CIA intervention had worked its magic once again. By 1994, Afghanistan, according to the UN drug control program had surpassed Burma as the world's number one supplier of raw opium.

Note: This story was more than two years in the making. I started reporting it in 1995 for the premier issue of a Portland-based magazine called Serpent's Tooth: Reporting the Drug War, which was meant to be a cross between Ramparts and Paul Krassner's The Realist, with plenty of sex ads to pay the bills. In fact, Krassner also wrote a scathingly funny piece for that issue, some ribald tale involving three of his favorite subjects: Bill Clinton, LSD and the virtues of masturbation. Alas, a few weeks before the magazine was ready to go to press, the trust-fund publisher pulled the plug on the entire venture after getting into a brawl with the editorial collective. In my experience, any time there's an "editorial collective" in charge, the publication is destined for a ventilator, especially when cocaine is involved. So, after spending more than a year working on my big piece on the Afghan war and the opium trade, it was orphaned. Portions of the story later appeared in CounterPunch, the Anderson Valley Advertiser and the Twin Cities weekly, City Pages. And a version of it ended up as a chapter in our book Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press .

– JSC

[Aug 02, 2020] Balkans Ahead! by Linh Dinh

Aug 02, 2020 | www.unz.com

Belgrade has been razed 44 times. In the 20th century, it was bombed thrice. In World War II, hundreds of thousands of Serbs were mass murdered by Croats, an undisputed fact still little known.

From the taxi into town, I was reintroduced to the concrete housing blocks that are typical of the former Eastern Bloc. Belgrade's few high-rises are left over the 1970's, perhaps the worst decade for architecture ever. Its gorgeous buildings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries have been crumbling for decades.

I passed a monstrously huge banner of Serbian soldiers, with the lead one a stern female saluting, with accusation in her eyes. This draped the former Yugoslav Defense Ministry . Bombed by NATO in 1999, its mauled remains are left as is .

At a nearby park days later, I'd chance upon a bronze statue of a small girl holding a rag doll. Framed by a black marble slab resembling butterfly wings, she stood on a grave-like marker that's partly inscribed, "DEDICATED TO THE CHILDREN KILLED BY NATO AGGRESSION 1999."

Most of the world, though, don't see Serbians as victims so much as perpetrators of genocide, as recently evidenced by the Siege of Sarajevo and, even more so, Srebrenica.

On July 13th, 2012, Eric Margolis wrote :

During the mid 1990's, the world turned its back on the massacres of Muslims in Bosnia. The UN would not call it genocide because that would have demanded military intervention. Most shamefully, the Muslim world also closed its eyes as up to 160,000 Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered, starved and tortured in Serb-run concentration camps. At least 10,000 Muslim girls and women were gang raped, some in special rape camps.

A hundred-and-sixty-thousand is an atrociously high number of victims, but how many were actually slaughtered, as opposed to tortured or starved? Surely, Margolis didn't mean they were all starved, tortured then slaughtered? It's an oddly ambiguous passage for a seasoned author.

In any case, Margolis had seen it coming:

In 1988, I wrote warning that Milosevic would create disaster in Bosnia and Kosova, the Albanian-majority region of southern Serbia. I was denounced in Belgrade and declared an enemy of the Serbs. In truth, I had always been an admirer of Serbs as courageous, intelligent people. But the Serbs that Milosevic rallied were the scum of the gutter, criminals, racists, brutal pig farmers, fanatical priests.

On December 8th, 2017, The Saker presented an entirely different take :

Truly, that war had it all, every dirty trick was used against the Serbs: numerous false flags attacks, pseudo-genocides, illegal covert operations to arm terrorists groups, the covert delivery of weapons to officially embargoed entities, deliberate attacks against civilians, the use of illegal weapons, the use of officially "demilitarized zones" to hide (fully armed) entire army corps – you name it: if it is disgusting it was used against the Serbian people. Even deliberate attacks on the otherwise sacrosanct journalistic profession was considered totally normal as long as the journalists were Serbs. As for the Serbs, they were, of course, demonized. Milosevic became the "New Hitler" (along with Saddam Hussein) and those Serbs who took up arms to defend their land and families became genocidal Chetniks.

On January 3rd, 2019, The Saker added :

Brigadier-General Pierre Marie Gallois of the French Army has condemned the NATO destruction of Yugoslavia, and has gone on record stating that the endless stories of Serb atrocities, such as mass rapes and the siege of Sarajevo were fabricated. Gallois also argues that the German elite sought revenge for the fierce Serb resistance during the two world wars, especially with regard to the Serb partisans that held up German divisions that were headed towards Leningrad and Moscow during Operation Barbarossa. While relentlessly demonized, the Serbs were in many ways the greatest victims of the NATO-orchestrated Balkan wars, as hundreds of thousands of Serbs were forcibly expelled from both Croatia and Kosovo while Serbia was turned into a free-fire zone by NATO for over seventy days. Washington took advantage of the conflict to solidify control over its European vassals.

The Saker's parents fled to Belgrade as Russian refugees, and he even had a Serbian godmother, so there is a strong emotional attachment here, which The Saker freely admits.

Still, The Saker at his website has rebutted the inflated hooey of Srebrenica with some hard facts .

It's entirely unclear, even approximately, how many were intentionally executed, instead of being killed in battle, whether by Serbs or other Muslims, or who died because of starvation, suicide or illness.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia's star witness, and the only one convicted of direct participation in the Srebrenica "genocide," was not a Serb, but a Bosnian Croat, Drazen Erdemovic.

On June 27th, 1996, the ICTY itself declared Erdemovic mentally impaired, yet, on July 5th, 1996, it put him on the witness stand anyway.

Even more incredibly, Erdemovic admitted he had fought for all three sides during that conflict, Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims. Dude couldn't decide whom he was trying to kill or defend.

In exchange for his testimonies against Serbs, Erdemovic was jailed for just five years, then given a new identity and whisked to a new country, so who knows, he might be living next to you as John Smith.

3

It's just a neighborhood squabble, you might be thinking. Who cares about Montenegroes? I've got my own black asses to kiss. I'm already kneeling, massa.

As always, though, there are lessons aplenty from the Balkans.

Serbs didn't have a country for five centuries, and Croats went stateless for eight, yet neither lost their fierce sense of nationhood, that is, their nationalism. It's not a debatable concept, but a deeply felt necessity, for how can any population with a unique history, heritage and identity not have its own homeland?

In the 21st century, such tribal thinking is not just deemed barbaric, but evil, Nazism, in short, except in Israel, of course. Gas chambers, remember?

When nations are contorted, tortured or simply enticed into any supranational entity, a correction, often violent, is inevitable, and that's exactly what has happened, repeatedly, in the Balkans. Wholesome pig farmers convulsed against the Ottomans, Austro-Hungarian Empire and Communists, etc. There is no progress beyond this.

This innate nationalism can only be purged when a population has been thoroughly cowed and/or brainwashed into renouncing itself, but the Serbs, for all for their defeats and humiliations down the centuries, never did. There's a magnificent lesson there.

Rebecca West, "So in the first battle of Kossovo the Serbs learned the meaning of defeat, not such defeat as forms a necessary proportion of all effort, for in that they had often been instructed during the course of their history, but of total defeat, annihilation of their corporate will and all their individual wills. The second battle of Kossovo taught them that one may live on such a low level of existence that even defeat cannot be achieved. The third taught them that even that level is not the lowest, and that there is a limbo for subject peoples where there is neither victory nor defeat but abortions which, had they come to birth, would have become such states."

Repeatedly butchered, suffocated and written off, Serbs have rebirthed themselves, thanks to their nationalism.

4

When the Turks were in Belgrade, they embellished this city with 273 beautiful mosques, so where the hell are they?! Only one is left, unfortunately, and the Bajrakli Mosque almost joined all the rest when it was torched in 2004, in retaliation for the burning of Serbian churches in Kosovo.

Built in 1575, it is elegant, intimate and handsomely proportioned, with the only false note the jivey, concrete minaret, clearly a recent replacement. Inside , I admired its minbar , octagonal wooden tablets etched with calligraphy and, especially, the stone, baroque frame around some verse, a nice East meets West touch. Light angled in from high windows . The darkened dome soothed.

It's an active mosque. Half a dozen suited Muslims milled outside, until they all left, so that I could have cleared out their mosque had I wanted to, and started World War III. Outside the gate, there was an old beggar , but she too disappeared, because I had already given her sixty cents.

Leaving the Bajrakli Mosque, I walked by Dukat, a Turkish restaurant, then Zein, a Lebanese one. The Arabic Zuwar was also nearby. Though not nearly as cosmopolitan as, say, Busan, contemporary Belgrade is no xenophobic backwater. Chinese takeouts dot the city, and there's even a Chinese shopping center at Blok 70, in New Belgrade.

I'm writing this in a bar, Dzidzi Midzi , where American pop music is played nonstop. On its walls are mostly photos of American icons, such as Hitchcock, Dylan, Hendrix, Buffalo Bill, Jack Nicholson, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Louis Armstrong and Bruce Lee (who was born in San Francisco, graduated from the University of Washington, married an American and is buried in Seattle). Though imploding, America still mesmerizes. Tellingly, there's just one Serb, Nicolas Tesla, and one Russian, Yuri Gagarin, who's depicted as a generic, faceless astronaut, with a quotation in English, "I see no god up here "

This is no touristy brewpub, but a Janko Janković joint in Hadžipopovac, a neighborhood of drab buildings, frankly. I'm paying $1.90 for a pint of Staropramen, and a flatbread sandwich with prosciutto and gouda is just $2.50.

Although Vietnam doesn't have an embassy here, there's a Vietnamese at the University of Belgrade. Here nine years and working on his second degree, this young man's so in love with Serbia, he's changed his name to Hoan Zlatanovic. Odder still was the Japanese who fought alongside Serbs and Russians in Bosnia. A self-declared "Japanese cheknik," he risked his life while forgoing a salary and his monthly cigar.

Oddest, perhaps, is Serbia's yearning to join the European Union, though not NATO, which already includes Croatia, Slovenia, Albania, North Macedonia and Montenegro. They're all leaning West. Last to board, they'll get to enjoy some choppy sailing with the big boys.

Bombing Serbia, America gave Russia and China a wakeup call, and forced them towards a new understanding. Everything changed after 1999. Again, this tiny nation played an outsized role in remaking our world.

Balkanizing, Americans can look here for warnings and inspiration. Five hundred years from now, a Serbian nation will still exist.

Linh Dinh's latest book is Postcards from the End of America . He maintains a regularly updated photo blog .

Erik Sieven , says: August 1, 2020 at 8:43 pm GMT

"Gallois also argues that the German elite sought revenge for the fierce Serb resistance during the two world wars, especially with regard to the Serb partisans that held up German divisions that were headed towards Leningrad and Moscow during Operation Barbarossa"
I wonder whether this french general has talked to some actual Germans. Everybody who knows just a little bit about german elites in the nineties knows that this an abstruse idea.

Franz , says: August 1, 2020 at 10:03 pm GMT

Balkanizing, Americans can look here for warnings and inspiration. Five hundred years from now, a Serbian nation will still exist.

Beautiful tail on a beautiful essay. Thanks, Linh.

As also, the Serbs had no choice in any Balkanization, but their American counterparts look on sheepishly as their plutocrat masters are inflicting it on the USA. Our end won't be justice: The same scum who used 1999 as practice are just using what they learned in California, etc. They won't be happy till the whole world is stateless and landless. Except them.

"Balkanization" is a curiously old subject. As a true wet-behind-the-ears nipper the first public speech I ever heard was during the one (and only) week I ever spent in New England. Ayn Rand gave her speech, entitled Global Balkanization at Boston's Ford Hall Forum in 1977. Just as a curiosity I wanted to see if it has any of it held up. She might have been on everyone's brown list by then, but her energy levels were still high:

https://ari.aynrand.org/issues/culture-and-society/education-and-multiculturalism/global-balkanization/

[Aug 02, 2020] The Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of Northeast Syria signed a deal to market oil to US-based Delta Crescent Energy LLC "with the knowledge and encouragement of the White House."

Aug 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Peter AU1 , Aug 2 2020 14:35 utc | 2

I put these comments on the open thread about the same time b started this one

https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1289724554982629377
The Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of Northeast Syria signed a deal to market oil to US-based Delta Crescent Energy LLC "with the knowledge and encouragement of the White House."

Trump a few months back "We've kept the oil". Well, he hasn't had a problem hanging onto it and getting an American company involved.

Delta Crescent Energy. Formed beginning of 2019 and nothing else on it. I guess Trump and a few mates divvying up the spoils.
https://www.bizapedia.com/de/delta-crescent-energy-llc.html

Laguerre , Aug 2 2020 15:00 utc | 6

The Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of Northeast Syria signed a deal to market oil to US-based Delta Crescent Energy LLC "with the knowledge and encouragement of the White House."

Posted by: Peter AU1 | Aug 2 2020 14:35 utc | 2

Very likely the Kurds were under pressure from Trump, and the act wasn't voluntary. It's not even the Kurds' oil to sign a deal on (except one well). We'll see whether the operation actually succeeds. At the moment, everybody is waiting to see whether Trump is re-elected in November. Signing a piece of paper now is of no significance.

[Aug 02, 2020] The USA military establishment are the masters of the deception game: the right to combat the internal enemy it is the right to instll puppet regime which will exterminate social workers, trade unionists, men and women who are not supportive of the establishment, and who are assumed to be communist extremists

Aug 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Maracatu , Aug 2 2020 15:01 utc | 7

How a US military doctrine became Colombia's 'origin of evil' | Part 1: "Popeye" :
What is known in Latin America as the National Security Doctrine [is] not defense against an external enemy, but a way to make the military establishment the masters of the game [with] the right to combat the internal enemy : it is the right to fight and to exterminate social workers, trade unionists, men and women who are not supportive of the establishment, and who are assumed to be communist extremists. And this could mean anyone, including human rights activists such as myself.

Colombia's former Foreign Minister Alfredo Vasquez

[Aug 02, 2020] Antifa and BLM work for Trump re-election

Notable quotes:
"... Does the mass media think they can “hide the ball” while Seattle turns into a war zone? Seriously–in the Internet age? They _can’t_ be that stupid, can they? ..."
Aug 02, 2020 | www.unz.com

Justvisiting , says:

@Nosquat Loquat

What they care about concocting a storyline that hurts Trump’s chances for reelection.

Law and order is a winning issue for incumbent Presidents. Seattle in chaos will get Trump re-elected.

If anyone has not seen the Trump campaign ad yet, here it is:

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1278837925535535105&lang=en

Does the mass media think they can “hide the ball” while Seattle turns into a war zone? Seriously–in the Internet age? They _can’t_ be that stupid, can they?

(When I put on the tin foil hat it whispers to me “they know, they are lying on purpose, they want Trump re-elected to improve their ratings, and they want to anger voters by lying about Seattle”. Then I take off the tin foil hat and I say “Na–they really are that stupid.”)

[Aug 02, 2020] Sources of Antifa and BLM funding

Aug 02, 2020 | www.unz.com

Rubicon , says: August 1, 2020 at 6:40 pm GMT

@Big Dan were Bolsheviks, they'd be out burning down BANKS, Corporatized Giants like Target, Walmart, Amazon warehouses and MOST of Silicon Tech Giants.

We know these protesters are funded by:
George Soros
The Ford Foundation
Amazon
Big Tech
Big Banks
Nike
Adidas
T-Mobile
Amazon
and ALL the other vulture capitalists that thrive in this environment.
Whitney, needs to start reading about the history of Socialism; Marx' acute hatred against Capitalism, Lenin, Others. Then and ONLY THEN will his preposterous statements reveal him as the usual ILLITERATE American.

A123 , says: August 2, 2020 at 11:47 am GMT
@Robert Dolan d come out to a modernistic building on York U's Keele Campus in Toronto to hear the stories of former Israeli soldiers.

York U's Vari Hall had been the scene of some ugly confrontations in the past, but no one had expected 500 BDS and Antifa bigots to show up screaming hatred and attacking Jewish students on campus.

PEACE
_______

(1) https://cms.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/bds-and-antifa-bigots-shout-back-ovens-torontos-daniel-greenfield

[Aug 02, 2020] Antifa and the mega rich and wall street tycoon money

Aug 02, 2020 | www.unz.com

Justvisiting , says: August 1, 2020 at 2:42 pm GMT

@Hossein ="https://www.ammoland.com/2020/06/antifa-osint-profile-violent-leftist-group-part-1/"> https://www.ammoland.com/2020/06/antifa-osint-profile-violent-leftist-group-part-1/
https://www.ammoland.com/2017/06/antifa-profile-radical-left-anarchist-group-part-2/
https://www.ammoland.com/2017/07/antifa-osint-profile-leaders-weaknesses-exposed-part-3/

Part 3 follows the mega rich and wall street tycoon money ..

[Aug 02, 2020] Some of Antifa fighters can be the most disgusting racists in the world.

Aug 02, 2020 | www.unz.com

Malla , says: August 1, 2020 at 1:26 pm GMT

@Trinity

Some of these Bolsheviks can be the most disgusting racists in the world. Some months back, a bunch of anti-fa criminal baffoons attacked two Hispanics, who they mistook to be members of the Conservative group 'The Proud Boys' and called them spics and beaners. So much for anti-racism.

[Aug 02, 2020] CIA Project MK-ULTRA by Larry Romanoff

Jul 02, 2020 | www.unz.com
Note to readers: This essay is an edited and abridged version, with content reformatted, of that originally posted here. It is updated with some new material and full references. A list of the most important references is at the end of the essay, before the notes. I deleted the small portion on P. W. Botha because I was unable to locate my primary reference which was text extracted from the Truth and Reconciliation hearings held in South Africa. The content was testimony by one of Botha's underlings at a hearing that Botha refused to attend. Rather than leave questions about the validity of statements, I deleted that section.

CIA Project MK-ULTRA

The United States government funded and performed countless psychological experiments on unwitting humans, especially during the Cold War era, perhaps partially to help develop more effective torture and interrogation techniques for the US military and the CIA, but the almost unbelievable extent, range and duration of these activities far surpassed possible interrogation applications and appear to have been performed from a fundamental monstrous inhumanity . To simply read summaries of these, even without the details, is almost traumatising in itself.

In studies that began in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the US Military began identifying and testing truth serums like mescaline and scopolamine on human subjects, which they claimed might be useful during interrogations of Soviet spies. These programs eventually expanded to a project of vast scope and enormous ambition, centralised under the CIA in what would come to be called Project MK-ULTRA, a major collection of interrogation and mind-control projects. Inspired initially by delusions of a brainwashing program, the CIA began thousands of experiments using both American and foreign subjects often without their knowledge or against their will, destroying countless tens of thousands of lives and causing many deaths and suicides. Funded in part by the Rockefeller and Ford foundations and jointly operated by the CIA, the FBI and the intelligence divisions of all military groups, this decades-long CIA research constituted an immense collection of some of the most cold-blooded and callous atrocities conceivable , in a determined effort to develop reliable techniques of controlling the human mind.

MK-ULTRA was an umbrella for a large number of clandestine activities that formed part of the CIA’s psychological warfare research and development, consisting of about 150 projects and sub-projects, many of them very large in their own right, with research and human experimentation occurring at more than 80 institutions that included about 50 of America’s best-known colleges and universities , 15 or 20 major research Foundations including Rockefeller, dozens of major hospitals, a great many prisons and mental institutions, and many chemical and pharmaceutical companies. At least 200 well-known private scientific researchers were part of this program, as were many thousands of physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists and other similar. Many of these institutions and individuals received their funding through so-called “grants” from what were clearly CIA front companies. In 1994 a Congressional subcommittee revealed that up to 500,000 unwitting Americans were endangered, damaged or destroyed by secret CIA and military tests between 1940 and 1974. Given the deliberate destruction of all the records, the full truth of the MK-ULTRA victims will never be known, and certainly not the death toll. As the inspector general of the US Army later stated in a report to a Senate committee: “In universities, hospitals and research institutions, an unknown number of chemical tests and experiments … were carried out with healthy adults, with mentally ill and with prison inmates.” According to one government report, “In 149 separate mind-control experiments on thousands of people, CIA researchers used hypnosis, electroshock treatments, LSD, marijuana, morphine, Benzedrine, mescaline, seconal, atropine and other drugs.” Test subjects were usually people who could not easily object – prisoners, mental patients and members of minority groups – but the agency also performed many experiments on normal, healthy civilians without their knowledge or consent.

There were 149 subprojects listed under the umbrella of MKULTRA. Project MONARCH has not been officially identified by any government documentation as one of the corresponding subprojects, but is used rather, as a descriptive “catch phrase” by survivors, therapists, and possible “insiders”. MONARCH may in fact, have culminated from MKSEARCH subprojects such as operation SPELLBINDER, which was set up to create “sleeper” assassins (i.e. “Manchurian candidates”) who could be activated upon receiving a key word or phrase while in a post-hypnotic trance. Operation OFTEN, a study which attempted to harness the power of occult forces was possibly one of several cover programs to hide the insidious reality of Project MONARCH. There were also operations BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MKNAOMI, and MKDELTA.

Another CIA Operation called Midnight Climax consisted of a network of CIA locations to which prostitutes on the CIA payroll would lure clients where they were surreptitiously plied with a wide range of substances including LSD, and monitored behind one-way glass. [1] [2] Several significant operational techniques were developed in this theater, including extensive research into sexual blackmail, surveillance technology, and the possible use of mind-altering drugs in field operations. In the 1970s, as another part of its mind control program, the CIA conspired with Eli Lilly and Company to produce one hundred million doses of the illegal drug LSD, enough to send almost everyone in the United States on a trip. No explanation was ever given as to what the CIA did with a hundred million doses of acid but, since much of this activity was exported, reviewing international political events during this period may bring interesting possibilities to mind.

Frank Olson Project

Another part of the CIA mind-control project was aimed at finding a “truth serum” to use on spies. Test subjects were given LSD and other drugs, often without their knowledge or consent, and some were tortured. Many people died – or were killed – as a result of these experiments, and an unknown number of government employees working on these projects were murdered for fear they would tell what they had seen, perhaps the best-known being Frank Olson whose death I have described below. [3] The project was steadfastly denied by both the government and the CIA, but was finally exposed after investigations by the Rockefeller Commission. When this information became known, the US government paid many millions of dollars to settle the hundreds of claims and lawsuits that resulted. There exists much evidence that these programs had never been terminated.

Unit 731

As already noted, MK-ULTRA and its brethren grew out of Operation Paperclip in which more than 10,000 Japanese and some German scientists of all stripes were smuggled into the US after the Second World War, to provide the government with information on torture and interrogation techniques. It isn’t widely known but, as part of Operation Paperclip, the CIA recruited for MK-ULTRA Shiro Ishii, the head of Japan’s Unit 731 which conducted some of the most horrendous human atrocities in history, including the live vivisection of children. It also imported at the same time at least ten thousands of the staff from Unit 731, housed them on US military bases and gave them full immunity from prosecution for their war crimes and crimes against humanity. [4] It is for this reason almost no Japanese faced trial for their crimes: they were all in America, contributing their skills to MK-ULTRA. The CIA also imported some Germans who had performed human experimentation. It also isn’t widely-known, but this entire project had its birth not in the US but at The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in the UK, an institute with an exceptionally cold-blooded past. I will return to Tavistock in later chapters.

The CIA leadership had concerns about discovery of their unethical and illegal behavior, as evidenced in a 1957 Inspector General Report, which stated:

“Precautions must be taken not only to protect operations from exposure to enemy forces but also to conceal these activities from the American public in general. The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles”.

The CIA’s MK-ULTRA activities continued until well into the 1970s when CIA director Richard Helms, fearing that they would be exposed to the public, ordered the project terminated and all of the files destroyed. However, a clerical error had sent many documents to the wrong office, so when CIA workers were destroying the files, some of them remained and were later released under a Freedom of Information Act request by investigative journalist John Marks. Nevertheless, because the records have almost all been destroyed, the numbers and identities of the victims will never be known.

The Stanford Research Institute

The Stanford Research Institute (SRI) describes its mission as “creating world-changing solutions to make people safer, healthier, and more productive.” Wikipedia tells us the trustees of Stanford University established SRI in 1946 as “a center of innovation to support economic development in the region”. I have no evidence that SRI has made anyone safer or more productive and, whatever the original purpose of this institution, supporting economic development of the region wouldn’t appear to have been very high on the list. From my research, there are few institutions in America that have had their histories more thoroughly sanitised than SRI. Certainly all references to participation in the CIA’s MK-ULTRA and other inhuman projects have evaporated from the narrative. In August of 1977, the Washington Post exposed some of these projects; there were likely many more.

One of SRI’s past activities involved contracts awarded by the CIA and the US Navy to research and develop long-distance mind control using radio waves. The CIA had already funded MK-ULTRA projects at Honeywell for “a method to penetrate inside a man’s mind and control his brain waves over long distance”. In the 1960s, then-Director of the CIA, Richard Helms, was excited about what was termed “biological radio communication”, and the Washington Post published concrete evidence that electronic mind control was a major object of study at SRI at the time. The theory was that extremely low frequency electromagnetic waves from the brain could be used to control individual subjects, sometimes called “empaths”, a great many of whom (inexplicably) were drawn from L. Ron Hubbard‘s Church of Scientology.

“Stargate Research”

Experiments also under the SRI, in what was sometimes called “Stargate Research”, [5] done entirely with a military biotechnology focus, the American Institutes of Research (AIR) in Washington was also involved in researching and evaluating what was called “remote viewing” or the potential use of psychic phenomena (ESP) in military and domestic applications. For all of this, declassified government files disclosed the vastness of several series of mind control and behavior modification experiments conducted in prisons, mental hospitals and campuses from 1950 through the early 1970s, with about 45 institutions and laboratories engaged in this secret and inhumane brain research, of which SRI was an integral part.

MK-Programs Leadership and Scope

The project was under the direct command of a Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and received undisclosed but almost unlimited millions of dollars for hundreds of experiments on human subjects at hundreds of locations across the United States, Canada and Europe, the eventual budget for this program apparently having exceeded $1 billion per year. The evil in some of these MK-ULTRA documents is almost palpable, one such document from 1955 stating openly of a search for “substances which will cause (temporary or) permanent brain damage as well as loss of memory” . Part of the intent was to develop “techniques that would crush the human psyche to the point that it would admit anything”. In a US government memo from 1952, a program director asked, “Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?” It also listed the wide range of horrid abuses to which the victims would be subjected. These people were not bashful about their intent.

The mechanics included primordial sex programming for women in attempts to eliminate learned moral convictions and stimulate primitive sexual instinct devoid of inhibitions, to create a kind of sex machine – the ultimate prostitute for diplomatic espionage. Several researchers have claimed the sexual appetite of these women was developed in young girls their formative years through constant incest with a government employee who had been deliberately developed as a father figure to the girls. In part, these programs involved conditioning the human mind through torture, with one portion of this program intended to train special agents as fearless terrorists lacking self-preservation instincts and who would willingly commit suicide if caught. They even experimented with electronic implants, inaudible sounds, messages embedded in the subconscious mind, mind altering drugs and much more. One portion of this extensive operation involved an attempt to create an assassins program, to learn if it were possible to kidnap a national in another country, conduct hypnosis and other techniques, then return them home to assassinate their leaders.

Dr. John Gittinger

There was also a Dr. John Gittinger who was Sidney Gottlieb’s protégé and who developed an astonishing complex of personality and psychological tests that were apparently quite accurate in guiding the CIA in determining the best approach toward manipulating and compromising individuals, including turning patriots into spies, as well as converting housewives, nurses, and high-priced fashion models into very effective espionage prostitutes, killers, and so much more. [6] [7] Gittinger was so successful the CIA built him a special party room walled with one-way mirrors where CIA psychologists could watch these compromised people at work. Gittinger was apparently a “specialist” at making his victims lose touch with external reality, no doubt in conjunction with Gottlieb’s LSD. He also was apparently quite expert at identifying those individuals who could be easily hypnotised, those who would quickly go into a trance compared to those who would not, and also those who would faithfully comply with any and all post-hypnotic suggestions and experience total amnesia afterward. Perfect assassins.

Gittinger applied his “personality” tests to at least 30,000 people, since he had files on at least that many, so this was not a trivial exercise for the CIA. And, since this was the CIA, he was especially interested in deviant personalities, or those that could be made deviant, those with vices or with weaknesses that could be further programmed, especially to become traitors, and those who would be most susceptible to the influence of psychedelic drugs. He worked closely with Harris Isbell, who ran the MKULTRA mind-control drug program at the Lexington, Kentucky detention hospital, who would send him hundreds of people who could be pushed to “uncontrollable urges”, especially of a sexual or a murderous nature. Or both. This was one main use of the party room with the one-way mirrors. Ironically, it was Gittinger who inadvertently put the wheels in motion for the impeachment and resignation of then-US President Richard Nixon. When Daniel Ellsberg [8] released the Pentagon Papers, John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s personal assistant, arranged for the CIA to break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist to obtain a copy of Gittinger’s personality and emotional test on this man, meant to be used by the CIA “as a kind of psychological road map to compromise Ellsberg”, just as they did in exploiting the weaknesses of so many others. Unfortunately, the burglars bungled the job.

There was one documented story of an American nurse who, after completing her training by Gottlieb and Gittinger, “had volunteered her body for her country”, and who was being programmed as the personal Mata Hari of a particular Russian diplomat and either get him to defect to the US or to become so compromised they could blackmail him into becoming an American spy. And, when necessary, “terminate” him. A great many of these encounters with what were called “recruitment targets” occurred in the room with the one-way mirrors and all recorded on film, one part of the sexual technology developed in the CIA safe houses in San Francisco as part of Operation Midnight Climax. Gottlieb’s Technical Services staff apparently amassed quite a wealth of experience and an abundance of “volunteers” in these sexual entrapment operations, claiming, “We had women ready – call them a stable” , who were quite adept at not only seduction but all manner of sexual activity and murder for the national security of their country.

Another portion of this same program designed to control individuals totally, “I was sent to deal with the most negative aspects of the human condition. It was planned destructiveness. First, you’d check to see if you could destroy a man’s marriage. If you could, then that would be enough to put a lot of stress on the individual, to break him down. Then you might start a minor rumor campaign against him. Harass him constantly. Bump his car in traffic. A lot of it is ridiculous, but it may have a cumulative effect.” The theory, according to Gittinger’s personality tests, was that the creation of sufficient stress from destructive personal loss, combined with other programming including the application of psycho-chemical drugs, would either turn an enemy or render him totally neutralised.

The CIA did all of these not only in America, but around the world, using Gittinger’s personality profiles to identify those military and other leaders in nations the US wanted to control. The psychological testing, combined with all the other dirty tricks of the trade, and certainly including the nurses, housewives and models who could be persuaded to develop “uncontrollable urges” to “volunteer her body for her country”, greatly assisted the US government in placing into power those who could be counted on to obey their colonial master. South Korea and Japan are two good examples of this, as are many countries in Latin America. The CIA, with the immense assistance of Gottlieb and Gittinger, could always spot those “who were most likely to succumb”.

Dr. Louis Jolyon West

Louis Jolyon (Jolly) West, M.D. (1924-1999) [9] [10] was a well-known Los Angles psychiatrist who served as the chair of UCLA’s Department of Psychiatry and as director of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute from 1969 to 1989. He was an expert on cults, coercive persuasion (“brainwashing”), alcoholism, drug abuse, violence, and terrorism, not in preventing these but in causing them. His “Violence Project” is famous.

From the reports, the CIA was so excited about the possibilities in these experiments at SRI that a great many millions of dollars were diverted to these projects, augmented by parapsychology experiments simultaneously undertaken at Fort Meade by the NSA. Medical oversight for this enormous range of experiments was under the control of yet another CIA pervert, Dr. Louis Jolyon West, then a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, one of the most notorious CIA mind-control specialists in the country. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that these people were all crazy , since the CIA, NSA and even INSCOM and military intelligence (and of course the Church of Scientology) all cooperated with SRI in research that included Tarot cards, the channeling of spirits, communing with demons, and more.

But according to SRI itself, Dr. West’s work included not only radio waves and parapsychology, but the creation of dissociative personalities “that enabled the subjects of mind-control conditioning to adapt to trauma”. West referred to these people as “changelings” who produced alternate but actually schizophrenic insane mental states (multiple induced personalities) to permit them to deal with what was termed “prolonged environmental stress”, i.e. forced drug injections, physical, mental and sexual abuse, and psychic programming, all usually utilising large dosages of LSD, Gottlieb’s chemical of choice. There is adequate documentation that many individuals who were subjected to this CIA-sponsored “research”, developed multiple personalities, many of which were forcibly induced at a young age. There are documented stories by a few survivors who tell of enormous abuse of every kind being inflicted upon them from four or five years of age, and of having to deal with the terror of what appeared to be many different people living inside their minds. Dr. Jolyon West became a kind of research expert in these dissociative states and much of his work for the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program centered on their creation. The records reveal success in creating amnesia, false memories, altered personas, pseudo-identities, and much more, all horrifying and tragic to the individuals involved, all from West’s research in methods to “disrupt the normally integrative functions of personality”, and render people totally subject to remote control.

UCLA VIOLENCE Project

In Sid Gottlieb’s group there were also scientists who implanted electrodes into human and other brains in yet more mind-control experiments, even done on children as young as four or five years of age, all with the intention of creating a perfect ‘Manchurian Candidate’, as well as erasing memories and creating artificial ones and, of course, total control of the individual. This research into electrode implants was funded by the CIA and MKULTRA in conjunction with the Office of US Naval Research, and mostly supervised by our famous Dr. West. In fact, West began what was called the “UCLA Violence Project” at the Vacaville Prison where Donald Defreeze was apparently programmed. The projects received a great deal of funding, as I recall, much of it including West.

Dr. Harold Wolff

Many early interrogation studies were conducted by the Cornell University Medical School under the direction of a Dr. Harold Wolff [11] who requested from the CIA any information regarding “threats, coercion, imprisonment, deprivation, humiliation, torture, ‘brainwashing’, ‘black psychiatry’, and hypnosis, or any combination of these, with or without chemical agents”. According to Wolff, the research team would then: “…assemble, collate, analyze and assimilate this information and will then undertake experimental investigations designed to develop new techniques of offensive/defensive intelligence use … Potentially useful secret drugs [and various brain damaging procedures] will be similarly tested in order to ascertain the fundamental effect upon human brain function and upon the subject’s mood …”. He further, and rather chillingly, wrote, “Where any of the studies involve potential harm of the subject, we expect the Agency to make available suitable subjects and a proper place for the performance of the necessary experiments.”

Among the many other prominent universities and institutions participating in this travesty was Tulane University where both the CIA and the US military had funded what appeared to be very large-scale programs of trauma-based mind control experiments on children. In 1955, the US Army reported on studies in which their researchers had implanted electrodes into the brains of mental patients to assess the effects of LSD and a host of other untested drugs. It was at Tulane that some of the earliest sensory-deprivation experiments were conducted, isolating individuals in these chambers where they would be helplessly hallucinating for as long as one week at a time while being injected with drugs and bombarded them with taped messages, to see if individuals could be “converted to new beliefs”. These were all helpless victims who had no idea of what was happening to them. There is a long list of other famous American universities and hospitals that participated in similar human destruction, all of which have carefully santised their histories.

Philip J. Hilts

When West died in 1999, the New York Times, again true to form, published a delightful obituary written by a Philip J. Hilts, [12] who described West as “a charismatic leader in psychiatry”, a man whose work “centered on people who have been taken to the limits of human experience, like “brainwashed” prisoners of war, kidnapping victims and abused children”, without bothering to mention that West’s supposed centering on these people did not mean he was caring for them, but that he created those conditions. West was in fact the man who was doing the brainwashing and abusing of children, not repairing their damage. Hilts told us West once witnessed an execution and was forever after against the death penalty for prisoners. It would seem unfortunate he wasn’t against a death penalty for his own victims. The NYT tells us West was “a colorful figure, an alive person”. How nice. All obituaries tend to be complimentary when written by family or friends, though when the compliment-only obituaries are written by the primary news media that has a powerful effect on whitewashing, air-brushing and re-writing history – which would certainly be the intent of the New York Times. Nothing else could account for the glowing description.

... ... ...

Many of the victims were drawn from children that had been placed in Cameron’s care, and most were sexually abused as part of the experimentation and “therapy”, many of them being used sexually by several men in one session. One of the children was filmed numerous times performing sexual acts with high-ranking federal government officials, in a scheme set up by Gottlieb’s MKULTRA team to blackmail the officials to ensure further funding for the experiments. Massive lawsuits ensued when the existence of this project became public. It should be noted that Dr. Cameron had been a member of the Nuremberg Tribunal that judged harshly and severely punished human experiments less evil than his own. But in fact Cameron, as well as Gottlieb, and as well as the related perverts at Fort Detrick and Edgewood, patterned these experiments in part on what they had learned from the Germans, then greatly embellished them.

In the 1980s, the CIA and the US State Department launched a vicious public counterattack on the Canadian government for questioning the propriety of CIA activities. In press briefings, interviews and Court pleadings, the CIA repeatedly stated that Canada funded Cameron too, and the atrocities were therefore Canada’s fault. One US Attorney claimed, “We’re going to wrap the Canadian Government financing of Cameron right around their necks”. Initially, the Canadian government intended to file charges against US and the CIA at the International Court of Justice at the Hague, but the Americans so bullied Canada into submission that the matter was whitewashed and forgotten.

The CIA was also responsible for many LSD experiments conducted in a mental hospital in Weyburn, Canada, [60] which is where the word “psychedelic” originated. According to former staff members, the CIA supplied the hospital with enormous amounts of LSD because it wanted to learn the effects on individuals of large and repeated doses of this drug. It was noted for its “cutting edge” treatments and “psychiatric drug research” at the time. The hospital has since been closed, and all records appear to have been destroyed, but both hospital staff and patients were often used in these experiments and over time the Weyburn hospital acquired a deeply sinister reputation. I was personally aware of the existence of that hospital during my youth, as were a great many of us, and all spoke only in hushed tones of the horror stories that sometimes leaked out of that institution. There is a website today for the cemetery of all those who died during their “courses of treatment” at the Weyburn hospital, [61] but the only remaining records are of the names and dates of death. Everything else was destroyed by the government, and for good reason.

The effects of sensory deprivation came to light from a series of quite innocent experiments conducted in Canada at McGill University by a Dr. Donald Hebb [62] who had paid a group of his own psychology students to remain isolated in a room, deprived of all senses, for an entire day, in an attempt to determine a link between sensory deprivation and the vulnerability of cognitive ability. Hebb was described as “a gifted man whose ingenuity revolutionized psychology as a science”, and who was nominated for a Nobel Prize, though I’m not certain the prize would have been a fitting recognition for his work. On September 6,2012, the McGill Daily published an article by Juan Camilo Velasquez titled, “MK-ULTRA Violence”, [63] which confirms that on June 1, 1951 “a secret meeting [was held] in the Ritz Carlton Hotel … to launch [an] effort led by the CIA to fund studies on sensory deprivation”, this being a meeting attended by Hebb who had to understand what was happening, and that these “studies” would inevitably lead to “techniques of psychological torture and interrogation”, with Dr. Ewen Cameron a few years later completing what Hebb had begun. The article continued:

“Cameron’s research was based on the ideas of “re-patterning” and “re-mothering” the human mind. Dr. Cameron wanted to de-pattern patients’ minds with the application of highly disruptive electroshock twice a day … patients would be put into a state of prolonged sleep for about ten days using various drugs, after which they experienced an invasive electroshock therapy that lasted for about 15 days. But patients were not always prepared for re-patterning and sometimes Cameron used extreme forms of sensory deprivation as well. Following the preparation period and the de-patterning came the process of “psychic driving” or re-patterning … in which Cameron would play messages on tape recorders to his patients … up to half a million times.

The experiments done at McGill were part of the larger MK-ULTRA project led by Sidney Gottlieb of the CIA … compiled all the research into a torture manual called the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Handbook. [64] Yes, a “torture manual” that would eventually define the agency’s interrogation methods and training programs throughout the developing world. The Kubark, which is nowadays readily available, cites the experiments conducted at McGill as one of the main sources of its techniques for sensory deprivation. An excerpt from the instructions to CIA interrogators reads, “Results produced only after weeks or months of imprisonment in an ordinary cell can be duplicated in hours or days in a cell which has no light, which is sound-proofed, in which odors are eliminated, et cetera”. In essence, the psychological paradigm taken by the CIA would not have been possible without Hebb and Cameron’s research on sensory deprivation and psychic driving.” You will recall John Cunningham Lilly whom I briefly discussed earlier, he of the exploding dolphin fame, and how his combination of sensory deprivation and hallucinogenic compounds could work wonders in programming individuals. Lilly too, learned well from Hebb and Cameron.

The Outsourcing of Child Sexual Abuse

In the Spring of 2016 the UK media (BBC, Telegraph, Mirror) revealed that former patients of Aston Hall, a childrens’ hospital in Derbyshire, had begun coming forward with claims that the hospital’s head physician, a Dr. Kenneth Milner, had been carrying out similar experiments on them in the early 1970s. [65] [66] The stories have all been consistent, the women claiming that as children they were regularly stripped naked and tied down, then subjected to various drug experiments, most often enduring forced sexual intercourse as well. Apparently one of the drugs commonly administered to the children was sodium amytal, which is a strong barbiturate often used clinically to circumvent inhibitions. It appears at least 100 children and perhaps a great many more – most being 10 to 12 years old at the time – were regularly and repeatedly used for a range of drug experiments involving high dosages of various anti-psychotics and anesthetics. Many report having been placed in a straitjacket prior to receiving the injections. Complaints of experiments and abuse apparently began against the hospital and Dr. Milner from multiple sources more than 20 years ago, but the authorities neglected to investigate. I have suspicions, and some firm indications, that Australia experienced similar atrocities which also await uncovering.

It appears increasingly possible the CIA was either outsourcing experiments or at least working in cooperation with institutions in countries other than Canada and the UK. On this note, I would add my strong suspicions that the most horrid experiments, those that have not yet come to light, were outsourced to Haiti and Puerto Rico . It is not a secret that the US has for decades used Haiti as a private biological laboratory and, since that small nation has been under the absolute control of the US and under an absolute media embargo, the US military and the CIA have been able to conduct operations there without reservation or inhibition.

Haiti is also a center for the worldwide pedophilia rings operated formerly for CIA experimentation and subsequently for purposes similar to those of Jeffrey Epstein – personal enjoyment and entrapment of politicians. An Italian social agency recently traced 640 of 1,000 pedophilia websites to a Haiti location, these websites offering not only live videos of the sexual abuse (some of it horrific) of children as young as 0 to 2 years of age, but also of the torture of these children as well as snuff films. [67]

Also, very recently Italian police busted a major “psycho-sect” that practiced child sex abuse for over 30 years. [68] And again very recently, there was a damning report by Germany’s University of Hildesheim revealed that the Berlin Senate orchestrated a scheme that saw vulnerable children being placed in the care of known pedophiles for decades. [69] This was in fact much of the work of MK-ULTRA and it appears that, while the Project may have been officially terminated, it has continued unabated by being outsourced. In 2018, a Dr. Faculty of Medicine, of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Peru, published an article titled The secret program of US mind control weapons: is it developing in latin America? [70] [71] [72] The man appears to know whereof he speaks, tracing the interest in mind control from the Rothschild’s Tavistock Institute in the UK through various steps to the CIA, listing many details of the projects and tracing mind control from the Nazis to DARPA.

The Death of Harold Blauer

Drug experiments were high on Gottlieb’s agenda from the very first days of his appointment, his main handicap being a lack of supply of available victims. As part of a strategy to solve this shortage, he first went to the obvious sources of helpless victims as in prisons, mental hospitals, orphanages, military hospitals and other institutions, but supplies appeared modest for his needs. Gottlieb then, with Dulles’ assistance, enlisted the help of all sections of the military, the CDC and Health Departments and other sources to arrange victims from ordinary civilian patients, and especially those in private hospitals and psychiatric clinics since they would be the most likely to accept experimental treatment without intelligent challenge and whose testimony would be least likely to be accepted without question when things went wrong – as they often did.

One such event was perhaps Gottlieb’s first murder, that of a famous American tennis pro named Harold Blauer who was visiting a private psychiatrist for depression following a divorce. [73] [74] [75] [76] Gottlieb, through the auspices of the US military, had arranged highly secretive and classified contracts with many such private psychiatrists to conduct drug studies without the knowledge of the patients, the chemicals in question being partially examined for their value as mass bio-warfare weapons for the military as well their more narrow potential with the CIA. In the case of Blauer, he was injected with increasingly large doses of a highly-toxic mescaline derivative, the last shot being an astonishingly huge overdose that killed him almost instantly. Of course, the cover-up was extreme and successful for a time, his medical records having been not only tampered with, but completely rewritten to describe Blauer as schizophrenic and insane, and attributing his death to “a weak heart “. It was only after 30 years that the truth leaked out and a court awarded Blauer’s family some $700,000 in damages for his death , the CIA and military denying and protesting to the very end until the leakage of classified documents exposed the facts.

This was a template Gottlieb and the CIA would follow for decades , inflicting death on an unknown but certainly very large number of individuals, the events always carefully planned without loose ends and with plausible deniability. There is a very distinct trail of at the very least hundreds, and very possibly thousands, of curious, questionable, suspicious and unexplained deaths that followed Gottlieb and his group around America and the world, for at least two decades. One, as related below, was the death of Frank Olson, in whose murder Gottlieb took a more active role, personally administering an overdose of LSD then initiating psychiatric treatment and finally Olson’s murder at the hands of Lashbrook, another conspiracy that was finally revealed only after many decades of denial. Since Helms had virtually all the MK-ULTRA records destroyed, the world will never know the sum of Gottlieb’s gruesome inhumanities.

The Life and Death of Frank Olson

Frank Olson was a scientist who had been working on the CIA’s MK-ULTRA Project, involved in experiments to assess the efficacy of certain bacterial strains on human beings, including the US military’s use of biological pathogens. But the CIA expanded far beyond lab experiments and progressed to testing these pathogens as part of an interrogation program, using “expendable” human subjects – Korean prisoners of war, apprehended foreign espionage agents, and even CIA agents who were suspected of disloyalty. Olson had the very highest security clearance and had been a witness to many programs and experiments in the US, the UK and Europe, but had never seen the direct results of his work. Then one summer, he visited a CIA “safe house” in Germany and the UK’s Frankenstein House at Porton Down where he witnessed “terminal interrogations”, men tortured and drugged until they died in agony from the weapons he had made. He had also been a part of the mass experiment in Pont St. Esprit, France, where the CIA had arranged to administer LSD to a whole town. Olson also claimed he had seen documented proof of US government use of biological weapons in North Korea during the Korean War – as the US had also done in China.

Olson began having serious problems with his conscience and had been expressing moral misgivings about his work. He told colleagues he was disturbed about CIA torture-to-death interrogations in Germany and the use of bacteriological warfare on North Korea. He became increasingly vocal in his criticisms of these projects, and it was this that sealed his fate. CIA director Allan Dulles decided Olson was a dangerous whistleblower and a security risk. At that point, Olson resigned his job, and a few days later he was dead. Gottlieb had personally administered a huge overdose of LSD to Olson, then arranged for ‘psychiatric’ counseling from his right-hand man Lashbrook. Olson was in a hotel room with Lashbrook, who claimed he killed himself by running across the room, throwing himself through a plate-glass window, and falling ten stories to his death. [77] The CIA’s initial story was that Olson’s death had simply been a tragic “accident” by a distressed individual, and for 22 years the family believed the official narrative. Then, in a US Congressional investigation into CIA atrocities and crimes, a declassified document contained information about a CIA agent who had been given LSD without his knowledge, and then escorted to New York in the company of another agent, where he committed suicide by jumping from a window. His family immediately recognised the circumstances of their father’s death and began a detailed investigation. In the end, the CIA admitted responsibility, the Olson family was invited to the White House to meet with President Ford who apologised and agreed to pay the family $750,000 in compensation – on the condition that they cease all further investigation and never try to determine any further facts about the Olson death. [78] [79] [80]

But the family didn’t cease their investigation, and finally had Olson’s body exhumed and examined. The forensic pathologist determined that Olson had suffered a severe blow to the head before he fell from the window. Many of the discrepancies surrounding his death were finally made fully public, and it was eventually revealed that Olson had been ordered killed by CIA Director Allen Dulles, and was executed by Gottlieb and Lashbrook, that the death was neither an accident as first claimed, nor a suicide as in the later story, but a deliberate murder to prevent the man from disclosing secrets of CIA crimes to the media. And in particular, the US government was fearful their use of biological weapons in North Korea would become public knowledge. It was only in 2012 that all investigations were completed, and the family has since filed a massive lawsuit against the CIA and the US government for Olson’s murder. Later transcripts revealed that the family was invited to meet with President Ford in a bid to stave off “a devastating PR problem”, and the money paid to the family was intended only to purchase their silence. But Olson’s son was never satisfied with the official explanation and spent two decades researching the events of his father’s death. Interestingly, the two people who were primarily responsible for the cover-up of the truth of Olson’s death were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who would later become, respectively, George Bush’s Vice-President and his Secretary of Defense.

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CIA Project MK-DELTA

MK-ULTRA also had a foreign component under the code name of MK-DELTA which was a similar program with similar intent, but with the horrifics inflicted surreptitiously on unwitting citizens of other countries. Often, a CIA agent would strike up a conversation with a stranger at a sidewalk cafe somewhere in Europe, offer to buy the person a drink, and spike it with a huge dose of LSD as practice for disabling foreign diplomats or heads of state in future clandestine operations. A great many lives were ruined in this way, many of them by Gottlieb personally. And it wasn’t only individuals; Gottlieb and the US military were also interested in the mass deployment of drugs and their accompanying insanities. Here are two stories of many:

Stanley Glickman

A young American artist named Stanley Glickman was sitting at a sidewalk cafe in Paris in 1952 when another friendly American began a conversation and brought Glickman a drink that was heavily spiked with LSD. [87] [88] The overdose was too much, and triggered a frightening psychotic episode. Glickman went into convulsions, suffered wild hallucinations, and had to be hospitalised. But that must have been part of the plan because he was taken to a local hospital where American doctors were apparently awaiting his arrival and where he claimed to have suffered substantial physical, mental and sexual abuse that included re-injections of LSD. He claimed that after his collapse at the cafe, one of the first actions by the American doctors was to insert a metal catheter into his penis and administer violent electro-shocks there, as well as repeatedly injecting him with additional hallucinogenic drugs. By the time of his release from the hospital, Glickman had suffered a mental breakdown from which he never recovered. He never painted again and his life remained in ruins.

But when the news began to break about the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program and details emerged from Congressional hearings, Glickman realised he had been one of the victims and, perhaps more importantly, he was able to conclusively identify Gottlieb as the man who had spiked his drink and who had supervised the ‘mind control’ torture in the Paris hospital. He filed a lawsuit, [89] which the CIA and the US government obstructed and delayed for 16 years, until Glickman died. But his sister carried on the lawsuit and it finally reached the courts. As luck would have it, Gottlieb was in the US at the time, having returned from his home in India to the US for medical treatment. However, immediately prior to his having to testify in court, Gottlieb died suddenly in the hospital, with the New York Times cryptically stating his family “refuses to disclose the cause of his death”. Gottlieb was apparently being treated for minor pneumonia when he “suddenly lapsed into a coma” from which he never recovered. You can imagine the fun conspiracy theorists had with this one.

It gets better. The trial proceeded without Gottlieb, but then suddenly the judge – who was anti-CIA and clearly heading for a substantial judgment against the government and Gottlieb’s estate – suddenly died of a claimed ‘heart attack’ in a gym near the courthouse on the day prior to issuing his judgment. [90] The US government immediately claimed authority to appoint a new judge to the case, and did so, with this new judge oddly enough being Kimba Wood, [91]

the same judge who had dismissed this same case two years earlier, claiming it to be nonsense. Naturally, she ruled against Glickman. But there was more that emerged later, with Glickman’s hospital records proving that two of the Paris doctors tending to him (along with Gottlieb) had for some time been engaged in Gottlieb’s LSD experiments on individuals. Perhaps there will be another chance for Glickman to receive some posthumous closure. In the meantime, we can perhaps content ourselves with the delicious prospect it was the CIA itself who silenced Gottlieb lips forever.

The Secret of Pont-Saint-Esprit

A 65-year-old mystery was finally solved by investigative journalists. In 1951, almost the entire population of the town of Pont-Saint-Esprit in Southern France was driven to mass hysteria and insanity , hallucinations and suicide. [92] [93] A great many people died and dozens were put into strait jackets and sent to mental asylums, in one of the world’s most bizarre mysteries. Many people tried to fly out of windows or from roofs of buildings. One man shouted “I am a plane” before jumping out of a second-floor window and breaking his legs. One man tried to drown himself, screaming that his belly was being eaten by snakes. An 11-year-old boy tried to strangle his grandmother. Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back. Time magazine wrote at the time: “Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead”. In the end, most everyone either died or was committed to a mental institution. For decades it was assumed that the local bread had been unwittingly poisoned with a psychedelic compound, speculating that the largest local baker had unwittingly contaminated his flour with ergot, a hallucinogenic mould that sometimes infects rye grain. But a journalist uncovered evidence that the tragic event resulted from a covert experiment by the CIA and the US Army’s top-secret Special Operations Division, where CIA operatives peppered local food with massive amounts of LSD as part of a mind control experiment.

As I wrote earlier, by 1950 the US military and CIA had already produced well-developed plans to ‘outsource’ the field testing of various pathogens to other nations, friend and enemy alike, with much of the surreptitious testing of LSD and other hallucinogens conducted in Europe and Asia under the code names of “Project Third Chance” and “Project Derby Hat”. For Pont St. Esprit, the CIA sent scientists from Sandoz, the supplier of the LSD, to concoct a plausible story as to the cause. The CIA concocted and executed many such plans to infect many locations both in the US and in foreign countries with a wide variety of pathogens. The journalist referred to above, was investigating the death of Frank Olson, the CIA biochemist we have already met, and discovered transcripts of a conversation between a CIA agent and a Sandoz pharmaceutical official who mentioned the “secret of Pont-Saint-Esprit”, explaining that it was not caused by mould but by LSD. Two colleagues of Olson further confirmed that that the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident was part of a mind control experiment run by the CIA and US army, having sprayed LSD into the air throughout the town as well as contaminating local bread and other food products. The final proof was in a White House document sent to members of the Rockefeller Commission during its investigation of CIA abuses. The document contained the names of those employed by the CIA for this job, and made direct reference to the “Pont St. Esprit incident”, and the culprit was of course none other than Gottlieb.

Americans Once Again Facing Their Crimes

One of the more enduring propaganda myths about America is the one about exposing and facing sins, unlike other nations who cover up everything. The Boston Globe published an article by Stephen Kinzer [94] who wrote in part: “Release of the long-delayed US Senate report on CIA abuses should make Americans proud …”, stating it is “reasonable for Americans to be proud when reading this report since other countries abuse people and lie about it, but it is only America that publishes reports of its crimes.” And the Senate report will “serve as an example to other countries wrestling with the challenges of facing their past”, that admitting their wrongdoing “is a sign of strength and maturity”, that “It is better to come clean than to leave questions of responsibility hanging forever”.

There was indeed some media exposure that revealed at most a few dozen, mostly minor, instances of illegalities out of the several hundred thousand horrors that actually occurred. There were indeed Congressional hearings, prior to which almost all incriminating documents had already been destroyed, and at which hearings everybody lied. There was the almost obligatory admission that “at least one person died” during these transgressions, but with the provision that he probably expired not from the programs themselves but “from related medical causes”. Then, like the tail end of a flu epidemic, the topic one day simply disappeared from sight.

The Church Committee Investigation on CIA activities: contains 23 downloadable .pdf files by topic. [95]

Then the Washington Post published an article in June of 2005, long after the truths of MK-ULTRA were well-known, repeating only this summary [96] : “In congressional testimony, Gottlieb acknowledged that the agency had administered LSD to as many as 40 unwitting subjects, including prison inmates and patrons of brothels set up and run by the agency. At least one participant died when he jumped out of a 10th-floor window in a hotel.”

The nation, having achieved its catharsis and absolution from all the media hype, could now re-envelop itself in national pride, secure in the knowledge its halo was still intact and that Americans were still superior to all other beings. Of course, one element in this tragic scandal – as in all others prior – was that nothing real actually happened. Nothing changed and nobody was punished. All the culprits, the murderers, the torturers, the inhuman monsters who planned and perpetrated this decades-long series of horrors on hundreds of thousands of innocent people, simply walked free. Gottlieb retired from the CIA with a medal and a huge pension, with all other participants doing something similar. And that was the end. The countless thousands whose lives were destroyed, were simply abandoned to their fate.

Sidney Gottlieb

Sidney Gottlieb [97] was a Jewish-American chemist who joined the CIA in his early 30s and within two years was appointed by Allen Dulles the designer and head of the agency’s vast and top-secret MK-ULTRA program, which was initiated to explore mind control, human programming, assassination and much more. Gottlieb was an expert in poisons, especially those with psycho-active effects and quickly became known as “The Black Sorcerer” and “The Dirty Trickster”. It was Gottlieb, with virtually unlimited CIA financing who initiated a truly massive program involving psycho-active drugs, psychic driving, the most evil portions of psychiatry and psychology, and a great many lethal poisons, to research and develop “techniques that would crush the human psyche to the point that it would admit anything”. Torture, “terminal interrogations” and a sickeningly-wide array of inhuman inflictions, were all part of MK-ULTRA under Gottlieb.

He not only created, managed and directed this decades-long human abomination but played an active part in its activities. It was Gottlieb who personally overdosed Frank Olson on LSD, and it was Gottlieb’s right-hand man who rendered Olson unconscious and threw him out the 13th-floor window of his hotel room, to rid the CIA of a potential whistle-blower. It was Gottlieb who arranged the cooperation with the similarly-perverted animals at the UK’s Porton Down, where they executed their ‘terminal interrogations’ safely away from American soil, and where Frank Olson witnessed such horrors that he planned to leave the CIA and go public with his knowledge.

It was Gottlieb who traveled to the Congo with poisoned toothpaste which he delivered personally to Larry Devlin, the CIA’s station chief, to administer to Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, though Devlin managed to kill him by other means. It was Gottlieb, acting through Allen Dulles on orders from US President Eisenhower to “eliminate” Lumumba and thus open the country to American business. [98] [99] [100] [101] It was Gottlieb who hatched the hundreds of plans to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro, especially including all the poison-related attempts, such as cigars, wet suits and fountain pens. In case you didn’t know, Castro set a Guinness World record for surviving 638 assassination attempts by the Americans. [102] [103] [104] [105]

It was Gottlieb who arranged for Iraq’s General Abdul Karim Qassim’s handkerchief to be contaminated with Botulinum in yet another assassination attempt. [106] He developed poisoned chocolates and cigarettes intended for Jamal abd an-Nasir of Egypt. [107] He regularly traveled with his diplomatic bag containing CIA-developed bio-toxins designed to mimic a disease endemic to that area, or with specifically-cultured lethal viruses.

It was Gottlieb who planned and financed the activities of Dr. Ewen Cameron in Canada in his so-called psychic driving experiments that totally destroyed the lives of so many people and in the end cost the Canadian government tens of millions of dollars in compensation. It was Gottlieb who was responsible for the thousands of Duplessis children who were tortured and killed, and who financed Dr. Harris Isbell in his research experiments in human psychiatric programming. Isbell is best known for once giving huge doses of LSD to a group of men for 77 days in succession, and for “testing” more than 800 toxic chemical compounds on captive victims for Gottlieb. It was Gottlieb, working with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who helped to conceive and execute the massive torture and human experimentation program in Vietnam known as Phoenix Program [108] and his genocidal “Project 100,000” , [109] with teams of CIA operatives performing a wide range of Gottlieb’s torture and other experiments followed by executions. Gottlieb also planned and financed much of the human experimentation by Lauretta Bender [110] , Albert Kligman [111] , Eugene Saenger [112] and Chester Southam [113] , and no doubt a great many more.

It was Gottlieb, being so fascinated with the mind-control potential psychotropic and hallucinogenic compounds, who was responsible for the contamination of food and the aerosol spraying of a lethally-potent LSD compound in the village of Pont-Saint-Esprit, France in August, 1951, that caused a powerful mass psychosis that left nearly the entire village population either dead or permanently confined to mental institutions. Gottlieb was so enthralled with the prospects of hallucinogens that he arranged with the pharma company Eli Lilly to produce one consignment of more than one hundred million doses of LSD.

Gottlieb designed and approved the sexual-related programs of the CIA, like Operation Midnight Climax and so many more, many of which involved the effective capture of female children or young women, subjected them to years of physical, sexual and psychological abuse, then turned them loose as robotic tools. Gottlieb arranged for many ‘safe houses’ where his programmed women would lure victims to be unwittingly fed large doses of LSD and engage in all manner of inhuman activity besides sex. There have been recurring stories, apparently credibly documented, of the walls of these houses covered with photos of naked and handcuffed women being whipped and tortured. Gottlieb was an inhuman predator of the worst kind. He deliberately sought out and typically selected for his thousands of test subjects and victims, children, prisoners, poor people, petty criminals, and the mentally ill, since they were “the least likely to be taken seriously should they have the temerity to complain” about being drugged, abused and tortured by US government officials.

It was Gottlieb, or his group, responsible for much of the programming of people like Sirhan Sirhan and Ted Kaczynski, and it is likely that Gottlieb’s group was also responsible for the conception and programming of the “Zebra murders” that resulted in a sudden wave of nearly 100 senseless random murders lacking any semblance of motivation, that swept California during the late 1960s and early 1970s. These, and many of the serial killing sprees that plagued California for the better part of a decade, all had patterns too similar to be coincidence, all linked to too many of the same people and institutions to be considered random events.

Although involved in designing and executing some of the CIA’s most covert and deadly – and obscenely inhuman – missions, Gottlieb did not appear to be the least bit troubled by the immoral dimensions of his work. He testified to a Senate Committee that though his MK-ULTRA activities might “sound harsh in retrospect”, and that some might call them murder, they were justified as issues of national security.

And Tim Wiener, writing his obituary in the New York Times (March 10, 1999), [114] [115] identifies Gottlieb simply as “the man who brought LSD to the CIA”, telling us he was “a genius” who was only “striving to explore the frontiers of the human mind for his country”, while at the same time “searching for religious and spiritual meaning in his life” . According to Wiener, Gottlieb “spent his later years caring for dying patients”, in a pretty village in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, noting that the CIA awarded Mr. Gottlieb the Distinguished Intelligence Medal. Wiener did note that with his experiments on unwitting subjects, Gottlieb violated the Nuremburg standards under which the same Americans executed Nazi doctors for crimes against humanity, but he failed to note that Gottlieb was certainly much more of a monster than the Nazis ever produced , that his crimes were also against humanity and were more extensive in scope, duration and degree than anything done in Germany. However, instead of being prosecuted and executed, Gottlieb was rewarded with praise and medals. Such is the hypocrisy of America. And of the fabled NYT, who once again produced their traditional glowing obituary of a Jewish psychopath.

The UK Independent couldn’t be left out of this parade, telling us so poignantly that “Gottlieb’s life after the CIA resembled a quest for atonement. With his wife Margaret, he spent 18 months in India running a leper hospital. He then moved back to rural Virginia, where he indulged two longstanding hobbies, folk dancing and goat herding. He devoted his final years to work in a hospice, looking after the dying.” [116] John Marks, too, in his book ‘The Search for the Manchurian Candidate’, stupidly claimed Gottlieb was “unquestionably a patriot, a man of great ingenuity” who never performed his actions “for inhumane reasons”, but instead “He thought he was doing exactly what was needed. And in the context of the time, who would argue?” So, just “a loyal servant of American government”. [117]

I have not been able to research one aspect of this to my complete satisfaction, but the results are sufficient to state that Project MK-ULTRA appears to have been almost in entirety a Jewish program. Gottlieb was Jewish, as were most of the individuals I could identify as being project leaders or sub-leaders, people like Dr. John Gittinger, Harris Isbell, James Keehner, Lauretta Bender, Albert Kligman, Eugene Saenger, Chester Southam, Robert V. Lashbrook, Harold Abramson, Charles Geschickter, Ray Treichler, and so many more. I have a list of more than 100 names. Likewise, many of the individuals conducting these human “experiments” at America’s top colleges and universities, hospitals, research foundations and mental institutions, were virtually all Jews, as were almost all of the physicians and psychiatrists whom I have been able to identify.

I would add something to this. The creation of MK-ULTRA coincided with the importation of the 500,000 German POWs to the US from Germany. You may or may not know of Eisenhower’s Death Camps where it is now proven (thanks to James Bacque’s ‘Other Losses‘) that the American military, following orders from its NWO masters, killed between 10 million and 14 million Germans in US concentration camps in Germany – in the years after the war ended, from about 1944 to 1948. About one million were shot dead, the remainder worked and starved to death. The photos that many of us have seen of huge piles of severely emaciated dead bodies that were purported to be Jews killed by the Germans were in fact of Germans killed by the Americans, and almost certainly on orders from a group of European Jews. Eisenhower issued orders that any German civilians attempting to bring food to these prisoners would be shot on sight, and many were. It was during this time that the 500,000 German POWs were transferred to the US from these camps in Germany on the stated pretense of “being able to better feed them”. With my best efforts over years, I have been unable to locate any credible documentation of these prisoners ever having left the US. The American government claims they were all shipped back to Germany in 1948, but there is no evidence to support this claim and the neither the International Red Cross, who were in charge of all such movements, nor US military records, nor anyone else, has any record of any Germans returning to anywhere in Europe from the US.

This coincides with the transfer to the US of Shiro Ishii’s entire Unit 731 staff who were tasked with experiments similar and related to MK-ULTRA, and also with the creation of the US CDC which, unknown to most Americans, was (and I believe still is) a unit of the US military and not a civilian health organisation. In fact, the CDC functions as the US military’s distributor of biological pathogens, among other things, and many of Ishii’s staff were seconded to the CDC on its formation. This all leads to the conclusion that the German POWs in the US were all used as ‘experimental material’ somewhere under the overall MK-ULTRA umbrella and that all died. I have written a separate article on this latter topic [118] , which I recommend you read. It ties together very closely with the topic of this essay.

Important References

Download “The Search for the Manchurian Candidate” John Marks

https://archive.org/details/searchformanchur00john

List of 149 MKULTRA Subprojects. Brief description, downloadable .pdf files on each.

https://www.illuminatirex.com/list-of-mkultra-subprojects/

MKULTRA Briefing Book – Brief summaries of each of the 149 MKULTRA subprojects

https://archive.org/download/MKULTRABriefingBookListOfSubprojectsWithBriefDescriptionsJanuary1976/MKULTRA%20Briefing%20Book%20-%20List%20of%20subprojects%20with%20brief%20descriptions%20-%20January%201976.pdf

MKULTRA FOIA Collection

http://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/cia-mkultra-collection/

This contains the full text (downloadble in chapters) of The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control – John Marks (c)1979; Published by Times Books ISBN 0-8129-0773-6

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks.htm https://ritualabuse.us/mindcontrol/mc-documents-links/mk-ultra-links-torture-based-government-sponsored-mind-control-experimentation-on-children/

The Illuminati Formula Used to Create an Undetectable Total Mind Controlled Slave

https://www.ivantic.info/Dejvid%20Ajk%20i%20zavere/Fritz%20Springmeier%20i%20Cisco%20Wheeler/Total%20Mind%20Control%20Slave.pdf

KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual; CIA Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual – 1983

This CIA interrogation manual, “Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual” [1983] is an updated version of KUBARK manual [1963] incorporating sections of KUBARK. The 1983 CIA training manual allocates considerable space to the subject of “coercive questioning” and psychological and physical techniques and recommends: “manipulate the subject’s environment to …”

https://ahrp.org/1983-cia-human-resource-exploitation-training-manual

Mind Control Cover-up – The Secrets of Mind Control

This summary is based on excerpts from three books: Bluebird by Colin Ross, MD; Mind Controllers by Armen Victorian; and A Nation Betrayed by Carol Rutz. The books contain hundreds of supporting footnotes, the information derived largely from 18,000 pages of declassified CIA mind control documents.

https://www.wanttoknow.info/mindcontrol?gclid=Cj0KCQjwpNr4BRDYARIsAADIx9x0I3WMyRH9xP5x22UoMCZOWRyHbm0nHn_OxEgq0ujzJoj42VTtM8oaAhN5EALw_wcB

The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists by Colin A. Ross

https://gangstalkingmindcontrolcults.com/project-mkultra-from-mind-control-wiki/ https://www.wanttoknow.info/mindcontrol?gclid=Cj0KCQjwpNr4BRDYARIsAADIx9x0I3WMyRH9xP5x22UoMCZOWRyHbm0nHn_OxEgq0ujzJoj42VTtM8oaAhN5EALw_wcB https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-quest-for-mind-control-torture-lsd-and-a-poisoner-in-chief?t=1595322103533

This contains the full record of the Joint Hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, Washington, DC, Wednesday, August 3, 1977

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/history/e1950/mkultra/index.htm

CIA Papers Link Harvard To Mind-Control Project

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1977/9/28/cia-papers-link-harvard-to-mind-control/

Extract from John Marks’ The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, Chapter 10. The Gittinger Assessment System (PAS)

https://abuse-drug.com/lib/The-Search-for-the-Manchurian-Candidate/10-the-gittinger-assessment-system.html http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_mindcon02.htm

Richard Helms – The Most Dangerous CIA Director

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/08/23/richard-helms-the-most-dangerous-cia-director/

Project MKUltra; Declassified MKUltra documents

http://oregonstatehospital.net/d/new%20habeas%20corpus/038%20Project%20MKUltra.pdf

June 15, 1999; US Official Poisoner Dies; by Jeffrey St. Clair – Alexander Cockburn

http://www.counterpunch.org/1999/06/15/us-official-poisoner-dies/

The CIA, They Make Monsters of Men, Manchurian Candidates

https://mindcontrolblackassassins.com/category/dr-sidney-gottlieb/page/2/

The secret program of US. mind control weapons: is it developing in Latin America?

1984 CBS 60 Minutes Interview with David Bradley

Project MKULTRA and the Search for Mind Control: Clandestine Use of LSD Within the CIA

http://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/history_capstones/6

Notes

[1] https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-cias-operation-midnight-climax-was-exactly-what-it-sounded-like-fa63f84ad015

[2] https://www.history.com/mkultra-operation-midnight-climax-cia-lsd-experiments

[3] https://frankolsonproject.org/the-story/

[4] https://brettwilkins.com/2018/04/23/antiwar-com-unit-731-how-leaders-of-japans-wwii-germ-warfare-unit-ended-up-working-for-the-us/

[5] https://atomicbooks.com/products/project-stargate-and-remote-viewing-technology-the-cias-files-on-psychic-spying

[6] http://impiousdigest.com/10-the-gittinger-assessment-system/all/1/

[7] https://abuse-drug.com/lib/The-Search-for-the-Manchurian-Candidate/10-the-gittinger-assessment-system.html

[8] https://www.biography.com/activist/daniel-ellsberg

[9] https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c84j0hcd/entire_text/

[10] https://www.freedommag.org/english/la/issue02/page12.htm

[11] https://ahrp.org/1953-dr-wolff-and-dr-hinkle-investigate-communist-brainwashing/

[12] https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/philip-j-hilts/memorys-ghost/

[13] https://www.timeofreason.com/an-army-of-sexually-abused-children-hidden-by-the-feds-it-is-time-to-rescue/

[14] https://targetedindividualscanada.com/tag/george-hoben-estabrooks/

[15] http://karlpribram.com/karl-pribram-1919-2015/

[16] https://www.ststworld.com/jose-delgado/

[17] http://www.biotele.com/Delgado.htm

[18] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23pXqY3X6c8

[19] https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/121849.John_C_Lilly

[20] https://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/us/john-c-lilly-dies-at-86-led-study-of-communication-with-dolphins.html

[21] https://pdf-download-free-books.firebaseapp.com/bjW6YLE/The%20Official%20Cia%20Manual%20Of%20Trickery%20And%20Deception%20PDF.pdf

[22] https://www.wired.com/2009/11/cias-lost-magic-manual-resurfaces/

[23] https://stefan-akpan.firebaseapp.com/qjOxrpN37/The%20Official%20Cia%20Manual%20Of%20Trickery%20And%20Deception%20Download%20Free%20(EPUB,%20PDF).pdf

[24] https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?next_url=https%3a%2f%2fwww.washingtonpost.com%2fnews%2ftrue-crime%2fwp%2f2018%2f06%2f04%2fthe-assassination-of-bobby-kennedy-was-sirhan-sirhan-hypnotized-to-be-the-fall-guy%2f

[25] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski

[26] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Symbionese-Liberation-Army

[27] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62EM_wYnKJ0

[28] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra_murders

[29] https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/The-rhymes-of-the-Zebra-murders-and-shootings-of-8392808.php

[30] https://targetedindividualscanada.com/2012/08/10/valerie-wolf-claudia-mullen-christine-denicola-testimonies/

[31] https://vimeo.com/26846581

[32] https://vimeo.com/user4296565

[33] A Nation Betrayed: Secret Cold War Experiments Performed on Our Children and Other Innocent People An interview with Carol Rutz

https://www.dougriggs.org/A_Nation_Betrayed_by_Carol_Rutz.pdf

[34] Carol Rutz’s Lecture at Indiana University in November 2003 – Experiments on Children; http://www.whale.to/b/rutz7.html

[35] https://www.illuminatirex.com/monarch-mind-control/

[36] https://www.amazon.com/Bluebird-Deliberate-Creation-Personality-Psychiatrists/dp/0970452519

[37] Bluebird – a 10-page summary: https://globalnoncompliance.webnode.com/news/bluebird-deliberate-creation-of-multiple-personality-by-psychiatrists/

[38] https://mind-control.fandom.com/en/wiki/Candy_Jones

[39] The CIA’s Control of Candy Jones: Bain, Donald; https://www.amazon.com/CIAs-Control-Candy-Jones/dp/1569802394

[40] https://historyofrights.ca/encyclopaedia/main-events/duplessis-orphans/

[41] https://sputniknews.com/world/201512151031794624-duplessis-orphans-canada-quebec-catholic-church/

[42] http://www.infobarrel.com/Quebecs_Duplessis_Orphans

[43] https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/duplessis-orphans

[44] http://canadiangenocide.nativeweb.org/duplessis_orphans.html

[45] https://www.cbc.ca/archives/topic/the-duplessis-orphans

[46] https://www.mcgill.ca/library/branches/osler/special-collections/penfield

[47] https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/veterans-file-legal-complaint-on-cia-mkultra-and-chemical-warfare-experiments/

[48] Trudeau government gag order in CIA brainwashing case silences victims; https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canadian-government-gag-order-mk-ultra-1.4448933

[49] http://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/compensation-for-cia-funded-brainwashing-experiments-paid-out-to-victim-s-daughter-60-years-later-1.4374552

[50] http://lunamoth1.blogspot.com/2011/06/dr-mengele-comes-to-quebec-1949.html

[51] https://www.mcgilltribune.com/mind-control-mcgill-mk-ultra/

[52] https://mkultragirl.org/category/dr-ewan-cameron/

[53] https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKcameronDE.htm

[54] https://ahrp.org/1950s-1960s-dr-ewen-cameron-destroyed-minds-at-allan-memorial-hospital-in-montreal/

[55] http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/episodes/2017-2018/brainwashed-the-secret-cia-experiments-in-canada

[56] http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/episodes/40-years-of-the-fifth-estate/mk-ultra

[57] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cia-brainwashing-allanmemorial-mentalhealth-1.4373590

[58] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/suit-alleges-infamous-md-ruined-woman/article22402086/

[59] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/Stiglitz-t.html

[60] https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/weyburn-mental-hospital

[61] http://eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/institutions/map/519b32ec4d7d6e000000000b#!

[62] https://www.jstor.org/stable/770204?seq=1 (Dr. Hebb)

[63] https://eassurvey.wordpress.com/category/mk-ultra-subproject-68/ (Velasquez)

[64] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB27/docs/doc01.pdf (Kubark)

[65] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-derbyshire-44943056

[66] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/12171386/Doctor-carried-out-experiments-on-patients-at-mental-hospital.html

[67] http://www.gospanews.net/en/2020/07/22/4thousand-toddlers-raped-chilling-report-by-italian-priest-who-helps-police-in-pedophiles-hunting/feed/

[68] https://www.rt.com/news/495310-italy-child-abuse-sect/

[69] https://www.rt.com/news/494890-berlin-pedophile-kentler-victims/

[70] https://medcraveonline.com/IPMRJ/the-secret-program-of-us-mind-control-weapons-is-it-developing-in-latin-america.html

[71] https://medcraveonline.com/IPMRJ/IPMRJ-03-00091.pdf (515 Kb)

[72] https://smjournals.com/physical-medicine/fulltext/smpmr-v2-1007.php

[73] https://apnews.com/2e5220ecb195844edacfbffdb0a37a5a

[74] https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Harold_Blauer

[75] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-05-05-mn-4098-story.html

[76] https://alchetron.com/Harold-Blauer

[77] https://www.thedailybeast.com/did-the-cias-dr-frank-olson-jump-to-his-death-or-was-he-pushed

[78] https://ahrp.org/church-committee-confirmed-frank-olson-given-lsd-white-house-concealed-information/

[79] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/06/from-mind-control-to-murder-how-a-deadly-fall-revealed-the-cias-darkest-secrets

[80] https://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/26/obituaries/alice-wicks-olson-77-forced-an-lsd-inquiry.html

[81] https://www.thedailybeast.com/did-the-cias-dr-frank-olson-jump-to-his-death-or-was-he-pushed

[82] https://frankolsonproject.org/the-story/

[83] https://archive.org/details/VisionsonTheSetUnsolvedMysteries-TheLifeAndDeathOfDr.FrankOlson

[84] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-25432367 (Dr. Basson)

[85] https://alchetron.com/Vladimir-Pasechnik

[86] https://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/03/us/california-doctor-s-suicide-leaves-many-troubling-mysteries-unsolved.html

[87] https://whowhatwhy.org/2016/06/03/classic-us-government-experiments-americans-lsd-mk-ultra/

[88] https://ahrp.org/1952-stanley-glickman-was-another-human-casualty-of-sidney-gottliebs-lsd-antics/

[89] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/626/171/1398799/

[90] https://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=144789.0#:~:text=At%20trial%20against%20his%20estate%2C%20the%20judge%20died,jury%20ruled%20against%20Glickman%E2%80%99s%20family%2C%20denying%20them%20justice.

[91] https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/756423/gloria-kronisch-of-the-estate-of-stanley-milton-gl/

Kimba M. Wood, Judge) granting summary judgment in favor of defendants

[92] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/7415082/French-bread-spiked-with-LSD-in-CIA-experiment.html

[93] https://ahrp.org/1951-pont-saint-esprit-the-devils-bread-or-a-disastrous-cia-lsd-experiment/

[94] https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/12/09/torture-report-shows-cia-followed-white-house-lead/WAFekmzqVSa38X7OOa9QcI/story.html

[95] http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book1/contents.htm

[96] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/15/AR2005061502685.html

[97] https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKgottlieb.htm

[98] https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol-59-no-4/death-in-congo-murdering-patrice-lumumba.html

[99] https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/02/magazine/the-cia-and-lumumba.html

[100] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/17/patrice-lumumba-50th-anniversary-assassination

[101] https://www.monitor.co.ug/OpEd/Commentary/DR-Congo–60–Challenge-and-legacy-of-a-false-start/689364-5591846-15r7te9z/index.html

[102] https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/fidel-castros-death/fidel-castro-cia-s-7-most-bizarre-assassination-attempts-n688951

[103] https://www.globalresearch.ca/after-638-assassination-attempts-fidel-castro-celebrates-90th-birthday/5541199

[104] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-castropedia-fidels-cuba-in-facts-and-figures-432478.html

[105] http://the-puzzle-palace.com/files/castroreport.htm

[106] http://www.executedtoday.com/2008/02/09/1963-abd-al-karim-qasim-iraqi-prime-minister/

[107] http://www.nlpwessex.org/docs/BBCSuez.htm

[108] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program

[109] https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/robert-mcnamaras-infamous-project-100000-and-the-vietnam-war-a-premeditated-crime-against-humanity/

[110] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauretta_Bender

[111] http://pabook2.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/RetinA.html (Albert Kligman)

[112] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Saenger

[113] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_M._Southam

[114] https://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/10/us/sidney-gottlieb-80-dies-took-lsd-to-cia.html

[115] http://www.constantinereport.com/obit-mkultras-sidney-gottlieb-nyt-march-10-1999/

[116] http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-sidney-gottlieb-1080920.html

[117] A Khazarian terrorist who deserved to be hanged; https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/07/19/a-khazarian-terrorist-who-deserved-to-be-hanged-before-he-died-part-vi/

[118] https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/prisoner-of-war-camps-in-america/


onebornfree , says: Website July 2, 2020 at 5:40 pm GMT

Thanks for this, Unz.com . Its probably overlong- and too detailed for the average reader to get their head around, but still, it contains a lot of information unbeknownst to the average individual- so maybe they'll get _something_ from it , even if they don't read the entire article.

My conclusion: After reading this type of article I have to remind myself that:

"Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect theft [taxes], and counterfeiting [central bank monopolies], all governments are essentially, at their very cores, 100% corrupt criminal scams which cannot be "reformed"or "improved",simply because of their innate criminal nature." [onebornfree]

.which means that, just like any other bureaucracy, the CIA cannot be "reformed" and be made "better", or more honest and less criminal. And a new director would not make a "dimes worth of difference" either.

Bottom line: The CIA, just like the FBI and all the rest of the 1000's of entirely unconstitutional federal agencies, needs to be abolished, NOW, and [ideally] all of its career criminals forced to stand trial for their many crimes against humanity. All of these evil fuckers and many more unlisted here need to be held accountable [and if not in this world, maybe in the next, assuming there is one].

Regards, onebornfree

anon [333] Disclaimer , says: July 2, 2020 at 6:04 pm GMT

Also, Tom ONeil in his book Chaos links Gottleib to the Manson family with documentary evidence. He's got Gottleib, Jolly West, and CIA grunt Reeve Whitson, who ran him day to day as an illegal domestic agent.

The book is marred by the current style of affected obsession. To get something incriminating published, a writer has to perform the role of conspiracy nut, draw attention away from his evidence, and open himself up to ad hominem impeachment of his facts.

What was the name of the judge who died of a heart attack on the Glickman case? I presume these were his bribed and blackmailed successors:

https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/756423/gloria-kronisch-of-the-estate-of-stanley-milton-gl/

Brás Cubas , says: July 2, 2020 at 7:53 pm GMT

I have not been able to research one aspect of this to my complete satisfaction, but the results are sufficient to state that Project MK-ULTRA appears to have been almost in entirety a Jewish program. Gottlieb was Jewish, as were most of the individuals I could identify as being project leaders or sub-leaders, people like Dr. John Gittinger, Harris Isbell, James Keehner, Lauretta Bender, Albert Kligman, Eugene Saenger, Chester Southam, and so many more.

Please provide some sources for your claim that the following persons are Jewish: John Gittinger, Chester Southam, Harris Isbell, and James Keehner.

Hapalong Cassidy , says: July 2, 2020 at 9:53 pm GMT

I think this stuff was almost certainly the kernel of truth that was behind the "Satanic Panic" of the 70's and 80's. And don't forget the mysterious "Finders Group@, which was also likely linked to MK Ultra.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theepochtimes.com/fbi-releases-information-on-the-finders-a-secretive-group-accused-of-child-sex-abuse_3128475.html/amp

Godfree Roberts , says: Website July 2, 2020 at 10:36 pm GMT

While I love a good conspiracy as much as anyone and have no doubts about US Government villainy, the absence of documentation does not inspire faith, or even curiosity in these allegations.

Furthermore, I knew one of the dramatis personae John Lilly, stayed with him and Toni in Decker Canyon whenever I was in SoCal, and participated in many his wacky experiments–all of which he inflicted upon himself in extremis before permitting me to try them.

John was a Western yogi: he used technology to induce psychic states that, for oriental practitioners, required years to self-manipulation. He was also humorous, kind hearted and generous–not the type one associates with systematic cruelty.

He was fascinated by marine mammals and was (the mid-seventies) outfitting a ship with a modified IBM 370 so that he could converse with them in real time. He may, in his earlier days as a surgeon, inserted electrodes in dolphins' brains, but that was an era when the procedure was a common treatment for humans.

Kali , says: July 3, 2020 at 8:32 pm GMT

@Larry Romanoff ion!
But please do include your references and source material. Long and substantial is much better fodder for the (unprogrammed) mind.

Maybe one day you might even review this current piece to insert those references you have. I know I'd be very grateful if you did! Maybe you could also give an idea of the percentage of Jewish involvement and the possitions they held, and even their (if any) connections to the Nuremburg Trials..? That could make an interesting study all by itself!

Many thanks for the interesting article.
Kali.

Dumb4asterisks , says: July 3, 2020 at 11:12 pm GMT

Botha learned his lessons perfectly, and had no difficulty creating precisely a multiple-persona robot army that would obey him without hesitation or question, and self-destruct upon failure. As part of his creation of horrors, he would gather young children and let them watch his men cutting off the ears, noses, and limbs of civilians who challenged his rule. But Botha was most famous for rounding up 10 year old boys, killing their parents in front of them, raping young women while they watched, then recruiting them to fight in his army. Instant multiple personalities.

Thank you for your providing most convincing living proof that not only did MK-ULTRA perform mind-bending experiments on people, but that it actually worked on you.

JohnPlywood , says: July 4, 2020 at 3:07 am GMT

Ted Kaczynski said in a letter that the Murray experiments he was involved in at Harvard were benign and inconsequential.

Joseph Magil , says: July 4, 2020 at 3:31 am GMT

Under the heading "Dr. Karl Pribram," you place a photograph of the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Shostakovich looked nothing like Pribram.

Biff , says: July 4, 2020 at 4:09 am GMT

With all the detailed accounts of experiments and names, I noticed I didn't see the name 'Charles Manson' anywhere? His life and times fits perfectly with this article.

Waltzing Matilda T , says: July 4, 2020 at 10:44 pm GMT

@JohnPlywood

Kacynski put his life at risk by ignoring the advice of his lawyers and insisting he was not mentally ill after he was apprehended. He deeply resents any suggestion that he is mentally unsound. I would be cautious about accepting his claims about the Murray experiments. Years ago, I recall reading an article in the Atlantic written by a man who was a friend of Kacynski's at Harvard. He said that after his involvement with Murray, Ted underwent a profound change. His relationship ended because Kacynski withdrew from all social contact.

Anon [295] Disclaimer , says: July 5, 2020 at 7:07 am GMT

@Larry Romanoff the list of subprojects and have any luck unmasking the researchers you find many wrote academic books. At the National Security Archive in Washington, DC they have all of the documents Marks' FOIAed for the book and I'm certain any decent researcher could start there and write a much better book. List of MKUltra subprojects.
http://ensemble.va.com.au/tableau/suzy/TT_ResearchProjects/Hexen2039/PsyO/mkultra.html

Regards,

Anon

P.S. Anyone with limited time should just study Gittinger's PAS.

JimDandy , says: July 6, 2020 at 4:18 am GMT

"It is for this reason no Japanese faced trial for their crimes"

What nationality was Tojo?

Si1ver1ock , says: July 7, 2020 at 1:34 am GMT

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.

–Thomas Jefferson

James N. Kennett , says: July 7, 2020 at 9:01 pm GMT

@anon

Also, Tom ONeil in his book Chaos links Gottleib to the Manson family with documentary evidence. He's got Gottleib, Jolly West, and CIA grunt Reeve Whitson, who ran him day to day as an illegal domestic agent.

For a sensible review of this book, see https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster80/lob80-chaos-charles-manson.pdf

milosevic , says: July 8, 2020 at 11:23 am GMT

some references, whose relevance will become clear upon review:

The Pedophocracy David McGowan -- PROGRAMMED TO KILL: The Politics of Serial Murder David McGowan -- The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation Martin Cannon -- The Controllers: A New Hypothesis of Alien Abductions Joël van der Reijden -- Beyond the Dutroux Affair: The reality of protected child abuse and snuff networks

Astuteobservor II , says: July 8, 2020 at 11:04 pm GMT

Damn. If true, evil as fuck. Scary as fuck.

anon [106] Disclaimer , says: July 9, 2020 at 1:06 pm GMT

James N. Kennett 29, I have read O'Neil's book, along with McGowan's less comprehensive but incisive and synoptic work. Experience with collateral is also helpful in interpreting the documentary evidence at issue because you need to know how CIA employs compartmentation.

I apologize if I unfairly impugned the sphincter tone of any of your stout-hearted manly friends but this particular writer is, on balance, full of shit. He's probably got the Eric Joyce criterion collection tucked away on his hard disk just in case he has an untoward flash of enlightenment.

The Lobster reviewer's conclusion is straight out of CIA memo 1035-960 ¶ 4(a.) It is notable that he recounts the evidence but then denies its import, waving it away with a wistful we'll-never-know shrug. All Mockingbird media apple-polishers can be categorized in terms of how far they follow their logical nose and at what point they veer off with some ridiculous non sequitur. That behavior depends not on the individual – they are fully interchangeable – but on the probative weight of the public evidence. That evidence is now conclusive. Manson was a illegal domestic CIA agent.

anon [411] Disclaimer , says: July 9, 2020 at 1:34 pm GMT

Ramsey and Dorrell are for real, worthy colleagues of Agee in denunciation of clandestine state crime. But CIA can do wonders inserting propaganda morsels into alt-media outlets. Just look at what they've done to whowhatwhy.com . Russ Baker is a force of nature yet his site is now infested with gullible partisans.

showmethereal , says: July 12, 2020 at 4:03 pm GMT

@JimDandy

He was a token. It is known Unit 731 mostly got away scot free. Check the numbers between German and Japanese prosecutions. Many Nazis helped develop NASA and other industry in the US after the war. Japanese were allowed to go home to rebuild Japan to keep communists out. All those big Japanese companies stayed in business after the war.

Billyd , says: July 22, 2020 at 1:46 am GMT

Hi. Do you have any more information on this piece . Rearding L Ron Hubbard and Scientology involvement.
Hush hush please thanks.

Larry Romanoff , says: Website July 22, 2020 at 6:52 am GMT

@Billyd them, though such links may well exist. Similar with Charles Manson and others.

In a topic such as this, with such an admittedly-huge number of projects and victims in many countries, It becomes difficult to know when to stop. There are hundreds of aberrant examples that could potentially have a connection to MK-ULTRA but, with most of the files destroyed, we will never know.

For the moment, it seems the most praiseworthy research would be to ignore the LSD portions and focus on the violence-induced multiple personalities because this is almost certainly the most horrific portion of the Project and there might be tens of thousands of victims yet to be discovered.

Justvisiting , says: July 28, 2020 at 4:33 am GMT

@milosevic

Glad to see the Cannon book listed–much of the UFO hysteria appears to be a side trail of the MK-Ultra mind-control experiments.

The elites had been contemplating (and perhaps still are planning) some sort of fake alien landing scenario to brainwash the world's masses into supporting a world government.

We haven't heard much about it lately-not sure whether that is good or bad!

Anonymous [190] Disclaimer , says: July 28, 2020 at 5:00 am GMT

@Larry Romanoff g+of+Nagasaki.jpg">

"Yet what kind of men were they who set their hands to the task [of rebuilding the temple]? They were men who constantly resisted the Holy Spirit, revolutionists bent on stirring up sedition. After the destruction which occurred under Vespa-sian and Titus, these Jews rebelled during the reign of Hadrian and tried to go back to the old commonwealth and way of life. What they failed to realize was that they were fighting against the decree of God, who had ordered that Jerusalem remain forever in ruins."

St. John Chrysostom, Adversos Judaeos

Anon [264] Disclaimer , says: July 28, 2020 at 5:24 am GMT

@Larry Romanoff eciate the reply and hard work on this article. I had a family member who died when I was quite young that worked/taught there.

In looking-up some of his journal articles from the 50s/60s, it appears he was involved in the injecting of radium into women at various stages of pregnancy to check for clearance times, as well as effects on fetal development.

I'm going to assume that his team was doing this without the informed consent of patients. I have no idea if this was something that would have been done under MK Ultra, much less whatever else they would have been doing – but it sounds not far off.

What a shit show this place is.

Bombercommand , says: July 28, 2020 at 5:30 am GMT

@Larry Romanoff

I knew one. Joined the Nazi Party because "that's how you got ahead". Wehrmacht. Interned in a POW camp in Colorado. Returned to Germany with all his "kameraden". Got married, immigrated to North America and raised a family and had a long career. A worthless asshole, and all his children were worthless greedy assholes that caused a lot of misery to innocent others. All that could have been prevented if he had been shot or starved to death in "Eisenhower's death camps".

Godfree Roberts , says: Website July 28, 2020 at 6:52 am GMT

@Larry Romanoff

You claimed that John was a "mad scientist" and inferred that he was a witting participant in some of the evil programs you describe.

My familiarity with him and his fellow investigators–including the very proper Gregory Bateson, who oversaw some of John's projects on behalf of the USG–does not support your claim.

They investigated fringe phenomena, like hallucinogens and sensory deprivation, in the same way scientists investigate everything. They were glad to get government funding and the fact that others would misuse their findings was beyond their control–as is the case with even the most mundane discoveries, including electricity.

Zarathustra , says: July 28, 2020 at 7:01 am GMT

Nahhhhh!

Just a cushy jobs with enormous salaries doing idiotic things like hypnotizing goats.

obwandiyag , says: July 28, 2020 at 7:25 am GMT

But I guess COINTELPRO is alright. Because you like that kind of infiltration. Hypocrites.

thotmonger , says: July 28, 2020 at 7:41 am GMT

There is gray. There is darkness. And there are black holes that suck light and love and life out of all that comes near. Evil pretends to not know the difference. Until on the death bed you see trembling and the hand grasping, oddly and feebly reaching out, as if trying to stop some very long fall.

[MORE]

Gleimhart Mantooso , says: July 28, 2020 at 7:51 am GMT

I saw a documentary on Amazon Prime about this last year.

The woman mentioned in the article -- the one with the medical records proof -- was in it. The doc also covered LSD experiments conducted in a small French village in the 1950's. They somehow laced some local bread with it, all with the knowledge of the French government. One person jumped to his death because he thought he was flying. The Canadian "hospital" was also covered.

Larry Romanoff , says: Website July 28, 2020 at 9:48 am GMT

@Anon

You have it right. I had written another article dealing with precisely your topic, as a kind of introduction to this much longer one, on the basis that readers might think "well, if they will do this, then they will probably do anything." It was all part of the same thing.

You might enjoy reading it. It's quite short. The US Government Declares War on America.

https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/part-1-the-us-government-declares-war-on-america/

Anonymous [661] Disclaimer , says: July 28, 2020 at 11:20 am GMT

About 15 years ago there was a report on a national nightly news program that revealed the Pentagon, quite a few years earlier, had secretly seeded the atmosphere above two small American cities with radioactive particles in order to study the effects of nuclear fallout on these city's populations.

Couldn't believe what I was hearing. But every attempt since then to find any information on that government program, or even any news archives about it, has led to a dead end.

Laurent Guyénot , says: July 28, 2020 at 11:36 am GMT

Mr Romanoff, you write:

MK-ULTRA and its brethren grew out of Operation Paperclip in which more than 10,000 Japanese and some

German scientists of all stripes were smuggled into the US after the Second World War, to provide the government with information on torture and interrogation techniques.

And then you write:

Project MK-ULTRA appears to have been almost in

entirety a Jewish program . Gottlieb was Jewish, as were most of the individuals I could identify as being project leaders or sub-leaders, people like Dr. John Gittinger, Harris Isbell, James Keehner, Lauretta Bender, Albert Kligman, Eugene Saenger, Chester Southam, Robert V. Lashbrook, Harold Abramson, Charles Geschickter, Ray Treichler, and so many more. I have a list of more than 100 names. Likewise, many of the individuals conducting these human "experiments" at America's top colleges and universities, hospitals, research foundations and mental institutions, were virtually all Jews, as were almost all of the physicians and psychiatrists whom I have been able to identify.

Isn't there a contradiction here?
That MK-Ultra is a Nazi operation brought to the US through Paperclip is a cliché that is widely disseminated. You find it for example in the recent film "Out of Shadow" (a Q-Anon production). But never is it mentionned that Gotlieb was Jewish; in fact, it is generally implied that he was a nazi. Your list of Jews involved in MK-Ultra is a major contribution (I was only aware of Gotlieb) but your assertion on the link with Nazi Germany through Paperclip lacks a similar list: you only provide a Japanese example. Can you provide some names? If not, don't you think that the theory of the MK-Ultra-Paperclip connection should be reconsidered as a kind of "accusatory inversion", a rumor spread by the Jewish press, Hollywood, and now the Q-Anon sect.

Larry Romanoff , says: Website July 28, 2020 at 1:01 pm GMT

@Anonymous

Those topics are covered here, in much detail and with many references:

https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/part-1-the-us-government-declares-war-on-america/

Saggy , says: Website July 28, 2020 at 1:11 pm GMT

Mengele escaped Germany and traveled to the US – where he apparently roamed freely for quite some time before the media and the public made him too hot for the CIA to handle and he was transshipped to Central America with US government funding.

This sounds like fantasy.

Has anyone actually seen 'Larry Romanoff'?

Johnny Walker Read , says: July 28, 2020 at 1:22 pm GMT

Great article Mr. Romanoff, very detailed and eye-opening. This one will be in the saved links file to be used as a reference for all things U.S. Mind Kontrol.

I find it funny it the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research(SIEPR)is one of the big producers of Covid19 fear porn, and tells us how delightful our "new not-normal" future will be. More proof we Americans pay zero attention to history, and therefor are doomed to repeat over, and over, and over.

The bright future of working from home
https://siepr.stanford.edu/research/publications/bright-future-working-home

Thanks again for an absolutely frightening look into the abyss that is American Intelligence covert/clandestine operations.

Desert Fox , says: July 28, 2020 at 1:39 pm GMT

The CIA and MI6 and the Mossad are the chain dogs of the imperial courts that rule the world aka the zionists and in the words of Mike Pompeo, " I was the CIA director, we lied, we cheated, we stole, it was like we had entire training courses ".

If interested , read these books The Committee of 300 by ex MI6 officer John Coleman, and The Secret Team by L. Fletcher Prouty, and By Way of Deception by ex Mossad officer Victor Ostrovsky.

DCThrowback , says: July 28, 2020 at 2:22 pm GMT

@Larry Romanoff nt for 3 hours on the Joe Rogan Podcast in August of 2019) book comes to a similar conclusion; West and Manson *likely* interacted, but there is no concrete evidence of it, despite the fact they were in the same place at the same time for about a year. There is also a ton of evidence that Manson was protected by federal sources as he committed crimes in CA in the years prior to the Tate-LoBianca murders.

Fascinating stuff. Thank you for your hard work.

One question: Do you think this ties in with David McGowan's work, specifically, "Programmed to Kill"?

DrWatson , says: July 28, 2020 at 2:43 pm GMT

@onebornfree

Basically, you agree with BLM then?

Laurent Guyénot , says: July 28, 2020 at 2:56 pm GMT

@Laurent Guyénot e-personally-had-never-harmed-anyone-in-his-life/

At the first Doctors' Trial at Nuremberg, Mengele was not even mentioned, nor was he even wanted by the Allies at that time, which is astonishing considering he was allegedly the most 'notorious' figure of 'Nazi evil' of the entire war.
And the so-called 'witnesses' to Mengele's alleged crimes couldn't even decide whether he had blond or brown hair, or blue or brown eyes. And the crimes he was accused of are preposterous for someone of Mengele's academic achievements and scientific understanding.

DCThrowback , says: July 28, 2020 at 3:02 pm GMT

@anon

Gosh darn Baker's book on the Bush Family ("family of secrets") was good.

ChuckOrloski , says: July 28, 2020 at 3:06 pm GMT

@Anonymous ion, the atomic bomb was dropped upon Hiroshima.

The serial killer bomb fell from the womb of "Enola Gay," named after Col. Tibbet's mother. In contrast, Mary, The Theotokos, gave birth to the Giver of Life.

As described in Consortium News, "For targeting purposes, the bombing crew used St. Mary's Urakami Cathedral, the largest Christian church in East Asia. At 11:02 a.m., on Aug. 9, 1945, when the bomb was dropped over the cathedral, Nagasaki was the most Christian city in Japan."

Thanks, # 901, the world ought to know the satanic history of the making of the atomic bomb.

gay troll , says: July 28, 2020 at 3:26 pm GMT

@Laurent Guyénot lluded to as history. Even now Wikipedia flatly denies that Jesus Christ is a syncretic myth that was transformed into historical propaganda. Why do the Zionazis want us to believe Jesus was real, even as they ridicule him and deny his divinity? Why is the culture war in America centered around Christianity, and its alignment with the Republican Party, if Jewish interests control both parties? Why is Christianity the fulcrum of Zionism?

To ascertain guilt we always ask cui bono ? And in politics we always look for a proven MO, such as control opposition, divide and conquer.

DCThrowback , says: July 28, 2020 at 4:30 pm GMT

@James N. Kennett

He comes close to this but cannot fully link them. He says as much on the Aug 2019 appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast. He says he can come very close, though.

Jus' Sayin'... , says: July 28, 2020 at 4:39 pm GMT

I'm surprised the notorious criminal boss and serial killer,Whitey Bulger, isn't mentioned. He was another victim of prison drug experiments. Bulger came back from prison a changed and much more dangerous and vicious an individual.

I find the article to be a feverishly written amalgam of useful, substantiated information, unsubstantiated assertions, tenuous innuendoes, and some absurdities.

It's frustrating because I want to pass on the substantiated material but know that many potential readers will be put off by the often Grand Guignol prose, yellow press innuendoes, and patent absurdities.

Agent76 , says: July 28, 2020 at 4:43 pm GMT

Apr 2, 2015 Ex-CIA Officer John Kiriakou: "The Government Turned Me Into a Dissident"

In 2007, John Kiriakou became the first Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official to publicly confirm that agency interrogators waterboarded a high-value detainee, terrorism suspect Abu Zubaydah -- a revelation that had previously been a closely guarded secret.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/GaiyVMRGE0M?feature=oembed

May 19, 2006 Secrets of the CIA, part 1

https://www.youtube.com/embed/9QYZBMIBOck?feature=oembed

Apr 13, 2017 Mkultra – The Cia's Psychic Warfare On The Soviet Union

Project Mkultra – The CIA's mind control program used by the US to counter the 'Soviet threat' and control foreign leaders including Fidel Castro.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/CIGSlNKYhBg?feature=oembed

Larry Romanoff , says: Website July 28, 2020 at 5:00 pm GMT

@DCThrowback

I do, yes. The great amount of similar evidence suggests there may be even more dots to connect, all related in some way to this umbrella program.

Too much of the literature and public mental image of MK-ULTRA focuses on the LSD, but the real connection is in human experimentation, and projects to learn to what extent humans could be controlled and what things they might be capable of doing.

AB_Anonymous , says: July 28, 2020 at 5:02 pm GMT

Great article !
And, unlike some commenters here, I don't need additional confirmations of existence
and practices the (a juicy hyphenated expletive goes here) use to experiment on, or to
"utterly destroy" (just like their Doctor recommended) people they target.
The good thing is that rightful anger can help to discover something that otherwise you
wouldn't have ever discovered. As they say, give people what they want !

Saggy , says: Website July 28, 2020 at 5:12 pm GMT

@Laurent Guyénot And, of course, a wealthy Jew bought Josef Mengele's diary at auction ( https://forward.com/news/breaking-news/140230/orthodox-jew-buys-mengeles-diaries-at-auction/
) and hid it from public view, which is proof there was nothing incriminating in it because if there had been, it would have been published in every known language on the face of the earth

.

The hoax would be unbelievable if it were not happening.

'Larry Romanoff' cannot resist the urge to write absurdities into his articles, to mock the goyim I believe.

Sollipsist , says: July 28, 2020 at 5:21 pm GMT

I'm tempted to say that it's a shame that someone would waste an above-average intelligence and dedication. But given the author's preoccupations, it's probably best that he limit himself to a topic which ensures that the smallest possible number of ineffectual and unsound people could be influenced by him. The more time he spends consumed by a merely 'journalistic' expression for his interests and imagination, the better for everyone. Just think of the horrors he might have been capable of, had he been given sufficient intelligence, charisma and opportunities to bring his fantasies to life.

Laurent Guyénot , says: July 28, 2020 at 5:59 pm GMT

@Saggy

More on the Mengele myth here, by the (generally) excellent Mike King: https://www.realhistorychannel.org/the-myth-of-dr_-mengele

Sya Beerens , says: July 28, 2020 at 6:00 pm GMT

@gay troll

Hitler was a Jew. According to the Dutch history teachers. That's what we've been taught. So there's two Jews Adolf and Anne. Other than that they don't exist . until you hear:

"ANTISEMITE ALERT!!!!"

Not that anyone's a Jew.

Johnny Rico , says: July 28, 2020 at 7:58 pm GMT

@showmethereal

Why didn't Stalin insist everybody be tried as war criminals? It was the Soviets who captured the main Unit 731 facility at Harbin.

John Fisher , says: July 28, 2020 at 9:12 pm GMT

Mr. Romanoff thank you for this work and others published on Unz. I have read many of them with interest and to my benefit, including the excellent 2,000 word piece you linked to in several comments. That one should be distributed widely.

Preface to my question: Clearly, you have taken a deep dive into the "unconscionable" (your word from the shorter essay) world of mind control and human experimentation.

My question: Is it possible that you cannot see the brilliant mind control operation being carried out right now in real time and on a world-wide level? If you cannot see it, how can that blind spot be explained?

This mind control operation has all the signs, using tactics both soft and hard. The incessant media and government propaganda applies the soft, physically non-invasive torture. Ever changing stories and shifting realities that lead people inexorably into a false identity.

The hard tactics, the physical invasive tortures, have been applied with a slow but equally inexorable increase in rituals: hand-washing, social distancing, masks, outright isolation, drugs (soon-to-be). What ghastly tortures await those who refuse to consent to these unmistakably occult-like rituals?

So, instead of using your expertise in mind control, gained through researching MK Ultra and the US government's "reprehensible history of illegal, unethical, and immoral experiments" on its own people (your words from the shorter essay), you come here in Mike Whitney's thread yesterday and debate statistics of COVID deaths in Sweden v. Norway. What a titanic waste of time! Unz is an amazing site, combining some of the most sublime commentary with some of the most mundane and inane and insane.

We are witnessing what can only be described as a masterstroke of mind control. It proceeds on a scale and with a breadth and depth that can only be explained by a dark intelligence far above human. Sure, like the mind control operations you have investigated, the human operatives are true psychopaths (like Gottlieb and Loretta Bender). But the coordination and operational control comes from a otherworldly darkness, a depraved evil that is above human capabilities. It comes from a spirit that hates humanity, but hates God most of all. We are no match for it.

Yet people spill hundreds of thousands of words arguing over ever shifting, ever falsified statistics in Sweden v. Norway or Spain or wherethefuckever? That is exactly where the master of this mind control psyop wants us to fixate our gaze. Look! Lockdowns worked here! No they didn't, they worked here! Hey, this virus came from a lab in Wuhan! No, it a US bio attack gone bad! China sucks, the US is great. China is great, the US sucks. Blah, blah, blah!

How far is your truth-seeking willing to go on this, Mr. Romanoff? Why not go there and help people escape full capture? You surely have uncovered the material to make you see it, as evidenced by this article and others.

I suppose some gatekeepers of limited hangouts are simply sincere, but still useful, idiots (not implying you here). Maybe some are willfully ignorant, or simply clever at trying to preserve a "stage" from which to speak.

Are you one as well? I hope not.

VinnyVette , says: July 28, 2020 at 9:44 pm GMT

As mentioned by another commenter, the absence of Charles Manson in this article seems a bit odd, especially considering the timeline of MK Ultra.
His ability to lure women and others into joining his commune, control and manipulate them. The drug use, sexual deviancy, slavery, and ultimately getting them to kill for him it's hard to believe he wasn't an MK Ultra asset turned loose on society as a kind of experiment to test these techniques.
The women were mostly from stable, middle class upbringings. At minimum you'd think they would have wanted to debrief him to learn how he did it. Everything Manson sounds like it's right out of the MK Ultra playbook, not unlike Jim Jones.

Dr. Robert Morgan , says: July 28, 2020 at 9:54 pm GMT

Larry Romanoff: "Rather than being an anarchist, Kaczynski's bombing campaign was both a cry for help and a quest for revenge. "

That's a ridiculous dismissal of Kaczynski's thinking and his many writings, which on major points parallel self-described Christian anarchist Jacques Ellul's work. Nobody questions whether Ellul is an anarchist, or calls his writings "a cry for help". Also, you, as a conspiracy theorist of the paranoid type, would likely be described as "mentally ill" by many psychologists. Could this article be your own "cry for help"?

[Aug 02, 2020] Russiagate, Nazis, and the CIA by ROB URIE

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The U.S. has spent a century or more trying to install a U.S.-friendly government in Moscow. Following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the U.S. sent neoliberal economists to loot the country as the Clinton administration, and later the Obama administration, placed NATO troops and armaments on the Russian border after a negotiated agreement not to do so . Subsequent claims of realpolitik are cover for a reckless disregard for geopolitical consequences. ..."
"... The paradox of American liberalism, articulated when feminist icon and CIA asset Gloria Steinem described the CIA as ' liberal, nonviolent and honorable ,' is that educated, well-dressed, bourgeois functionaries have used the (largely manufactured) threat of foreign subversion to install right-wing nationalists subservient to American business interests at every opportunity. ..."
"... To the point made by Christopher Simpson , the CIA could have achieved better results had it not employed former Nazi officers, begging the question of why it chose to do so? ..."
"... Russiagate is the nationalist party line in the American fight against communism, without the communism. Charges of treason have been lodged every time that military budgets have come under attack since 1945. In 1958 the senior leadership of the Air Force was charging the other branches of the military with treason for doubting its utterly fantastical (and later disproven) estimate of Soviet ICBMs. Treason is good for business. ..."
"... Shortly after WWII ended, the CIA employed hundreds of former Nazi military officers, including former Gestapo and SS officers responsible for murdering tens and hundreds of thousands of human beings , to run a spy operation known as the Gehlen Organization from Berlin, Germany. Given its central role in assessing the military intentions and capabilities of the Soviet Union, the Gehlen Organization was more likely than not responsible for the CIA's overstatement of Soviet nuclear capabilities in the 1950s used to support the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Former Nazis were also integrated into CIA efforts to install right wing governments around the world. ..."
"... Under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act passed by Congress in 1998, the CIA was made to partially disclose its affiliation with, and employment of, former Nazis. In contrast to the ' Operation Paperclip ' thesis that it was Nazi scientists who were brought to the U.S. to labor as scientists, the Gehlen Organization and CIC employed known war criminals in political roles. Klaus Barbie, the 'Butcher of Lyon,' was employed by the CIC, and claims to have played a role in the murder of Che Guevara . Wernher von Braun, one of the Operation Paperclip 'scientists,' worked in a Nazi concentration camp as tens of thousands of human beings were murdered. ..."
"... To understand the political space that military production came to occupy, from 1948 onward the U.S. military became a well-funded bureaucracy where charges of treason were regularly traded between the branches. Internecine battles for funding and strategic dominance were (and are) regularly fought. The tactic that this bureaucracy -- the 'military industrial complex,' adopted was to exaggerate foreign threats in a contest for bureaucratic dominance. The nuclear arms race was made a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the U.S. produced world-ending weapons non-stop for decades on end, the Soviets responded in kind. ..."
"... Long story short, the CIA employed hundreds of former Nazi officers who had the ideological predisposition and economic incentive to mis-perceive Soviet intentions and misstate Soviet capabilities to fuel the Cold War. ..."
"... the U.S. had indicated its intention to use nuclear weapons in a first strike -- and had demonstrated the intention by placing Jupiter missiles in Italy, nothing that the U.S. offered during the Missile Crisis could be taken in good faith. ..."
"... Following the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, the Cold War entered a new phase. Cold War logic was repurposed to support the oxymoronic 'humanitarian wars' -- liberating people by bombing them. In 1995 'Russian meddling' meant the Clinton administration rigging the election of Boris Yeltsin in the Russian presidential election. Mr. Clinton then unilaterally reneged on the American agreement to keep NATO from Russia's border when former Baltic states were brought under NATO's control . ..."
"... The Obama administration's 2014 incitement in Ukraine , by way of fostering and supporting the Maidan uprising and the ousting of Ukraine's democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, ties to the U.S. strategy of containing and overthrowing the Soviet (Russian) government that was first codified by the National Security Council (NSC) in 1945. The NSC's directives can be found here and here . The economic and military annexation of Ukraine by the U.S. (NATO didn't exist in 1945) comes under NSC10/2 . The alliance between the CIA and Ukrainian fascists ties to directive NSC20 , the plan to sponsor Ukrainian-affiliated former Nazis in order to install them in the Kremlin to replace the Soviet government. This was part of the CIA's rationale for putting Ukrainian-affiliated former Nazis on its payroll in 1948. ..."
"... That Russiagate is the continuation of a scheme launched in 1945 by the National Security Council, to be engineered by the CIA with help from former Nazi officers in its employ, speaks volumes about the Cold War frame from which it emerges ..."
"... Its near instantaneous adoption by bourgeois liberals demonstrates the class basis of the right-wing nationalism it supports. That liberals appear to perceive themselves as defenders 'democracy' within a trajectory laid out by unelected military leaders more than seven decades earlier is testament to the power of historical ignorance tied to nationalist fervor. Were the former Gestapo and SS officers employed by the CIA 'our Nazis?' ..."
"... Furthermore, are liberals really comfortable bringing fascists with direct historical ties to the Third Reich to power in Ukraine? And while there are no good choices in the upcoming U.S. election, the guy who liberals want to bring to power is lead architect of this move. ..."
Jul 31, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org
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The political success of Russiagate lies in the vanishing of American history in favor of a façade of liberal virtue. Posed as a response to the election of Donald Trump, a straight line can be drawn from efforts to undermine the decommissioning of the American war economy in 1946 to the CIA's alliance with Ukrainian fascists in 2014. In 1945 the NSC (National Security Council) issued a series of directives that gave logic and direction to the CIA's actions during the Cold War. That these persist despite the 'fall of communism' suggests that it was always just a placeholder in the pursuit of other objectives.

The first Cold War was an imperial business enterprise to keep the Generals, bureaucrats, and war materiel suppliers in power and their bank accounts flush after WWII. Likewise, the American side of the nuclear arms race left former Gestapo and SS officers employed by the CIA to put their paranoid fantasies forward as assessments of Russian military capabilities. Why, of all people, would former Nazi officers be put in charge military intelligence if accurate assessments were the goal? The Nazis hated the Soviets more than the Americans did.

The ideological binaries of Russiagate -- for or against Donald Trump, for or against neoliberal, petrostate Russia, define the boundaries of acceptable discourse to the benefit of deeply nefarious interests. The U.S. has spent a century or more trying to install a U.S.-friendly government in Moscow. Following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the U.S. sent neoliberal economists to loot the country as the Clinton administration, and later the Obama administration, placed NATO troops and armaments on the Russian border after a negotiated agreement not to do so . Subsequent claims of realpolitik are cover for a reckless disregard for geopolitical consequences.

The paradox of American liberalism, articulated when feminist icon and CIA asset Gloria Steinem described the CIA as ' liberal, nonviolent and honorable ,' is that educated, well-dressed, bourgeois functionaries have used the (largely manufactured) threat of foreign subversion to install right-wing nationalists subservient to American business interests at every opportunity. Furthermore, Steinem's aggressive ignorance of the actual history of the CIA illustrates the liberal propensity to conflate bourgeois dress and attitude with an imagined gentility . To the point made by Christopher Simpson , the CIA could have achieved better results had it not employed former Nazi officers, begging the question of why it chose to do so?

On the American left, Russiagate is treated as a case of bad reporting, of official outlets for government propaganda serially reporting facts and events that were subsequently disproved. However, some fair portion of the American bourgeois, the PMC that acts in supporting roles for capital, believes every word of it. Russiagate is the nationalist party line in the American fight against communism, without the communism. Charges of treason have been lodged every time that military budgets have come under attack since 1945. In 1958 the senior leadership of the Air Force was charging the other branches of the military with treason for doubting its utterly fantastical (and later disproven) estimate of Soviet ICBMs. Treason is good for business.

Shortly after WWII ended, the CIA employed hundreds of former Nazi military officers, including former Gestapo and SS officers responsible for murdering tens and hundreds of thousands of human beings , to run a spy operation known as the Gehlen Organization from Berlin, Germany. Given its central role in assessing the military intentions and capabilities of the Soviet Union, the Gehlen Organization was more likely than not responsible for the CIA's overstatement of Soviet nuclear capabilities in the 1950s used to support the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Former Nazis were also integrated into CIA efforts to install right wing governments around the world.

By the time that (Senator) John F. Kennedy claimed a U.S. 'missile gap' with the Soviets in 1958, the CIA was providing estimates of Soviet ICBMs (Inter-continental Ballistic Missiles), that were wildly inflated -- most likely provided to it by the Gehlen Organization. Once satellite and U2 reconnaissance estimates became available, the CIA lowered its own to 120 Soviet ICBMs when the actual number was four . On the one hand, the Soviets really did have a nuclear weapons program. On the other, it was a tiny fraction of what was being claimed. Bad reporting, unerringly on the side of larger military budgets, appears to be the constant.

Under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act passed by Congress in 1998, the CIA was made to partially disclose its affiliation with, and employment of, former Nazis. In contrast to the ' Operation Paperclip ' thesis that it was Nazi scientists who were brought to the U.S. to labor as scientists, the Gehlen Organization and CIC employed known war criminals in political roles. Klaus Barbie, the 'Butcher of Lyon,' was employed by the CIC, and claims to have played a role in the murder of Che Guevara . Wernher von Braun, one of the Operation Paperclip 'scientists,' worked in a Nazi concentration camp as tens of thousands of human beings were murdered.

The historical sequence in the U.S. was WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, to an economy that was heavily dependent on war production. The threatened decommissioning of the war economy in 1946 was first met with an honest assessment of Soviet intentions -- the Soviets were moving infrastructure back into Soviet territory as quickly as was practicable, then to the military budget-friendly claim that they were putting resources in place to invade Europe. The result of the shift was that the American Generals kept their power and the war industry kept producing materiel and weapons. By 1948 these weapons had come to include atomic bombs.

To understand the political space that military production came to occupy, from 1948 onward the U.S. military became a well-funded bureaucracy where charges of treason were regularly traded between the branches. Internecine battles for funding and strategic dominance were (and are) regularly fought. The tactic that this bureaucracy -- the 'military industrial complex,' adopted was to exaggerate foreign threats in a contest for bureaucratic dominance. The nuclear arms race was made a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the U.S. produced world-ending weapons non-stop for decades on end, the Soviets responded in kind.

What ties the Gehlen Organization to CIA estimates of Soviet nuclear weapons from 1948 – 1958 is 1) the Gehlen Organization was central to the CIA's intelligence operations vis-à-vis the Soviets, 2) the CIA had limited alternatives to gather information on the Soviets outside of the Gehlen Organization and 3) the senior leadership of the U.S. military had long demonstrated that it approved of exaggerating foreign threats when doing so enhanced their power and added to their budgets. Long story short, the CIA employed hundreds of former Nazi officers who had the ideological predisposition and economic incentive to mis-perceive Soviet intentions and misstate Soviet capabilities to fuel the Cold War.

Where this gets interesting is that American whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg was working for the Rand Corporation in the late 1950s and early 1960s when estimates of Soviet ICBMs were being put forward. JFK had run (in 1960) on a platform that included closing the Soviet – U.S. ' missile gap .' The USAF (U.S. Air Force), charged with delivering nuclear missiles to their targets, was estimating that the Soviets had 1,000 ICBMs. Mr. Ellsberg, who had limited security clearance through his employment at Rand, was leaked the known number of Soviet ICBMs. The Air Force was saying 1,000 Soviet ICBMs when the number confirmed by reconnaissance satellites was four.

By 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the CIA had shifted nominal control of the Gehlen Organization to the BND, for whom Gehlen continued to work. Based on ongoing satellite reconnaissance data, the CIA was busy lowering its estimates of Soviet nuclear capabilities. Benjamin Schwarz, writing for The Atlantic in 2013, provided an account, apparently informed by the CIA's lowered estimates, where he placed the whole of the Soviet nuclear weapons program (in 1962) at roughly one-ninth the size of the U.S. effort. However, given Ellsberg's known count of four Soviet ICBMs at the time of the missile crisis, even Schwarz's ratio of 1:9 seems to overstate Soviet capabilities.

Further per Schwarz's reporting, the Jupiter nuclear missiles that the U.S. had placed in Italy prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis only made sense as first-strike weapons. This interpretation is corroborated by Daniel Ellsberg , who argues that the American plan was always to initiate the use of nuclear weapons (first strike). This made JFK's posture of equally matched contestants in a geopolitical game of nuclear chicken utterly unhinged. Should this be less than clear, because the U.S. had indicated its intention to use nuclear weapons in a first strike -- and had demonstrated the intention by placing Jupiter missiles in Italy, nothing that the U.S. offered during the Missile Crisis could be taken in good faith.

The dissolution of the USSR in 1991 was met with a promised reduction in U.S. military spending and an end to the Cold War, neither of which ultimately materialized. Following the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, the Cold War entered a new phase. Cold War logic was repurposed to support the oxymoronic 'humanitarian wars' -- liberating people by bombing them. In 1995 'Russian meddling' meant the Clinton administration rigging the election of Boris Yeltsin in the Russian presidential election. Mr. Clinton then unilaterally reneged on the American agreement to keep NATO from Russia's border when former Baltic states were brought under NATO's control .

The Obama administration's 2014 incitement in Ukraine , by way of fostering and supporting the Maidan uprising and the ousting of Ukraine's democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, ties to the U.S. strategy of containing and overthrowing the Soviet (Russian) government that was first codified by the National Security Council (NSC) in 1945. The NSC's directives can be found here and here . The economic and military annexation of Ukraine by the U.S. (NATO didn't exist in 1945) comes under NSC10/2 . The alliance between the CIA and Ukrainian fascists ties to directive NSC20 , the plan to sponsor Ukrainian-affiliated former Nazis in order to install them in the Kremlin to replace the Soviet government. This was part of the CIA's rationale for putting Ukrainian-affiliated former Nazis on its payroll in 1948.

That Russiagate is the continuation of a scheme launched in 1945 by the National Security Council, to be engineered by the CIA with help from former Nazi officers in its employ, speaks volumes about the Cold War frame from which it emerges.

Its near instantaneous adoption by bourgeois liberals demonstrates the class basis of the right-wing nationalism it supports. That liberals appear to perceive themselves as defenders 'democracy' within a trajectory laid out by unelected military leaders more than seven decades earlier is testament to the power of historical ignorance tied to nationalist fervor. Were the former Gestapo and SS officers employed by the CIA 'our Nazis?'

The Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act came about in part because Nazi hunters kept coming across Nazi war criminals living in the U.S. who told them they had been brought here and given employment by the CIA, CIC, or some other division of the Federal government. If the people in these agencies thought that doing so was justified, why the secrecy? And if it wasn't justified, why was it done? Furthermore, are liberals really comfortable bringing fascists with direct historical ties to the Third Reich to power in Ukraine? And while there are no good choices in the upcoming U.S. election, the guy who liberals want to bring to power is lead architect of this move. Cue the Sex Pistols .

[Aug 02, 2020] Modern jihadism was co-invented in 1979 by Saudi Prince

Aug 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

LuBa , Aug 1 2020 7:13 utc | 77

"Modern jihadism was co-invented in 1979 by Saudi Prince"

Yes after the Mecca siege they found the potential of wahabi islam(redefined by Qutb teachings in the previous years) to be used against the enemy of zionism.Without 20 November 1979 (not in Teheran but in Mecca) there wouldn't have been any suicide bomber in the years after.Those men with long beards and strong motivations were a great threat to the saudi family..they had no fear to die for their struggle because the struggle was all their life...They had a genuine hatred for usa and saudi corrupted state.It was only a matter of annihilating them internally and at the same time promoting their birth everywhere in the Sunni Islamic world...to serve the zionist scum.

[Aug 01, 2020] Executed Turkish general exposed misuse of Qatari funds for Syria extremists- Report - Al Arabiya English

Highly recommended!
Aug 01, 2020 | english.alarabiya.net

Executed Turkish general exposed misuse of Qatari funds for Syria extremists: Report Semih Terzi, a general within the Turkish army, was executed on the night of the 2016 Turkish coup attempt against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (Photo via the stockholmcf) Ismaeel Naar, Al Arabiya English Friday 31 July 2020 Text size A A A

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The Turkish army executed a senior general within its ranks after he had discovered the embezzlement of illicit Qatari funding for extremists in Syria by public officials, according to a 2019 court testimony unveiled in a report by the Nordic Monitor.

Semih Terzi, a general within the Turkish army, was executed on the night of the 2016 Turkish coup attempt against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

For all the latest headlines follow our Google News channel online or via the app.

The new allegations unveiled in court testimonies from a hearing March 20, 2019at Ankara 17th High Criminal Court were made by Col. Fırat Alakuş, an army officer working within Turkey's Special Forces Command's intelligence section.

According to the Nordic Monitor, Terzi is said to have been executed after discovering that Lt. Gen. Zekai Aksakallı, in charge of the Special Forces Command at the time, was working covertly with Turkey's National Intelligence Organization (MIT) "in running illegal and clandestine operations in Syria for personal gain while dragging Turkey deeper into the Syrian civil war."

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"[Terzi] knew how much of the funding delivered [to Turkey] by Qatar for the purpose of purchasing weapons and ammunition for the opposition was actually used for that and how much of it was actually used by public officials, how much was embezzled," Col. Alakuş was quoted as saying by the Nordic Monitor via his court testimony.

The Nordic Monitor said in its report published on Friday that Alakuş testified that Aksakallı had run a gang outside of the chain of command within the Turkish intelligence that was involved in illicit activities.

The report further alleged that Terzi was aware of public officials involved in oil-smuggling operations with ISIS from Syria.

"[Terzi] was aware of who in the government was involved in an oil-smuggling operation from Syria, how the profits were shared, and what activities they were involved in," Alakuş said in his testimony.

[Jul 30, 2020] Financial capitalism is bloodthirstily by definition as it needs new markets. It fuels wars.

Jul 29, 2020 | crookedtimber.org

steven t johnson 07.29.20 at 3:14 pm (50 )

PS likbez@46 reminded me of a line from the movie Reds. Warren Beatty's John Reed spoke of people who "though Karl Marx wrote a good antitrust law." This was not a favorable comment. The confusion of socialism and what might be called populism is quite, quite old. Jack London's The Iron Heel has its hero pointing out even before the Great (Class) War that the normal operations of capitalism, concentration and centralization, destroyed the middle class paradise of equal competition. It wasn't conspiracies.

likbez 07.29.20 at 3:30 pm

@steven t johnson 07.29.20 at 3:14 pm (51)

Jack London's The Iron Heel has its hero pointing out even before the Great (Class) War that the normal operations of capitalism, concentration and centralization, destroyed the middle class paradise of equal competition.

I think the size of the USA military budget by itself means the doom for the middle class, even without referring to famous Jack London book (The Iron Heel is cited by George Orwell 's biographer Michael Shelden as having influenced Orwell's most famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.).

Wall Street and MIC (especially intelligence agencies ; Allen Dulles was a Wall Street lawyer) are joined at the hip. And they both fully control MSM. As Jack London aptly said:

"The press of the United States? It is a parasitic growth that battens on the capitalist class. Its function is to serve the established by moulding public opinion, and right well it serves it."
― Jack London, The Iron Heel

Financial capitalism is bloodthirstily by definition as it needs new markets. It fuels wars. In a sense, Bolton is the symbol of financial capitalism foreign policy.

It is important to understand that finance capitalism creates positive feedback loop in the economy increasing instability of the system. So bubbles are immanent feature of finance capitalism, not some exception or the result of excessive greed.

[Jul 29, 2020] How Modern Jihadism Became Co-Invented by the U.S. and Saudi Governments -- Strategic Culture

Jul 29, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

Modern jihadism was co-invented in 1979 by Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan al Saud, and U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, working together, and here is the background for it, and the way -- and the reasons -- that it was done:

Back in the later Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church and its aristocracies had used religious fervor in order to motivate very conservative and devout people to invade foreign countries so as to spread their empire and to not need to rely only on taxes in order to fund these invasions, but also to highly motivate them by their faith in a heavenly reward. It was far cheaper this way, because these invading forces wouldn't need to be paid so much; the reason why they'd be far cheaper is that their pay would chiefly come to them in their afterlife (if at all). That's why people of strong faith were used. (Aristocracies always rule by deceiving the public, and faith is the way.) Those invaders were Roman Catholic Crusaders, and they went out on Crusades to spread their faith and so 'converted' and slaughtered millions of Muslims and Jews, so as to expand actually the aristocracies' and preachers' empire, which is the reason why they had been sent out on those missions (to win 'converts'). This was charity, after all. (Today's large tax-exempt non-profits are no different -- consistently promoting their aristocracy's invasions, out of 'humanitarian' concern for the 'welfare', or else 'souls', of the people they are invading -- and, if need be, to kill 'bad people'. This has been the reality. And it still is. It's the way to sell imperialism to individuals who won't benefit from imperialism -- make mental slaves of them.)

The original Islamic version of the Christian Crusades, Islamic Holy War or "jihad," started on 14 November 1914 in Constantinople (today's Istanbul) when the Sheikh Hayri Bey, the supreme religious authority in the Ottoman Empire , along with the Ottoman Emperor, Mehmed V , declared a Holy War for their Muslim followers to take up arms against Britain, France, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro in World War I. They were on Germany's side, and lost. (That's the reason why the Ottoman Empire ended.) Both the Sheikh and the Emperor had actually been selected -- and then forced -- by Turkey's aristocracy, for them to declare Islamic Holy War at that time. In fact, the sitting Sheikh, Mehmet Cemaleddin Efendi , in 1913, was actually an opponent of the pro-German and war-oriented policy of the Union and Progress Party, which represented Turkey's aristocrats, and so that Sheikh was replaced by them, in order to enable a declaration of Islamic Holy War. Jihad actually had its origin in Turkey's aristocracy -- not in the Muslim masses, and not even in the Muslim clergy. It resulted from an overly ambitious Turkish aristocracy, hoping to extend their empire. It did not result from the public. And, at that time, relatively few Muslims followed this 'Holy' command, which is one reason why the Ottoman Empire soon thereafter ended.

Incidentally, so as to clarify how Turkey's aristocracy ran the show, at that time, Taner Akçam's September 2006 "The Ottoman Documents and the Genocidal Policies of the Committee for Union and Progress toward the Armenians in 1915" reported that:

The fact that the decision about the Armenians was made after a great deal of thought, based on extensive debate and discussion by the Central Committee of the CUP [Committee for Union and Progress] , can be understood by looking at other sources of information as well. The indictment of the Main Trial states as follows: ''The murder and annihilation of the Armenians was a decision taken by the Central Committee of the Union and Progress Party.'' These decisions were the result of ''long and extensive discussions.'' In the indictment are the statements of Dr. Nazım to the effect that ''it was a matter taken by the Central Committee after thinking through all sides of the issue'' and that it was ''an attempt to reach a final solution to the Eastern Question .'' 54 In his memoirs, which were published in the newspaper Vakit, Celal, the governor of Aleppo, describes the same words being spoken to him by a deputy of the Ottoman Parliament from Konya, coming as a ''greeting of a member of the Central Committee .'' This deputy told Celal that if he had ''expressed an opinion that opposed the point of view of the others, [he would] have been expelled .'' 55

(And, consequently, when Hitler allegedly -- on 22 August 1939 , right before his invasion of Poland which started WW II, and it is on page 2 here , but the sincerity and even the authenticity of that alleged private 'speech' by him should be questioned and not accepted outright by historians -- cited Turkey's genocide against Armenian Christians as being proof that genocide is acceptable, Hitler would actually have been citing there not only a Muslim proponent of genocide, but an ally of Germany who had actually done it, because the Ottoman Empire's aristocracy had been both Muslim and German-allied. Hitler would, in that 'speech', if he actually said it, have been citing that earlier ally of Germany, which had actually genocided Christians. The genocide happened, even if that speech mentioning it was concocted by some propagandist during WW II.)

The new jihad, or Islamic version of the Crusades, is, however, very different from the one that had started on 14 November 1914. It wasn't Turkish, it instead came straight from Turkey's top competitor to lead the world's Muslims, the royal family who owned Saudi Arabia, the Sauds. But they partnered with America's aristocracy, in creating it.

Today's jihadism started in 1979, when U.S. President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski (a born Polish nobleman), and his colleague Prince Bandar bin Sultan al Saud, re-created jihad or Islamic Holy War, in order to produce a dirt-cheap army of Pakistani fundamentalist Sunni students or "mujahideen," soon to be renamed Taliban ( Pashto & Persian ṭālibān, plural of ṭālib student, seeker, from Arabic ) so as to invade and conquer next door to the Soviet Union the newly Soviet-allied Afghanistan, and to turn it 'pro-Western', now meaning both anti-Soviet, and anti-Shiite. (The Saud family hate Shiites , and so do America's aristocrats, whose CIA had conquered Shiite Iran in 1953, and who became outraged when Shiites retook Iran in 1979. And, from then on, America's aristocracy, too, have hated Shiites and have craved to re-conquer Iran. By contrast, the Sauds had started in 1744 to hate Shiites.) So, modern Islamic Holy War started amongst fundamentalist Sunnis in Pakistan in 1979, against both the Soviets and the Iranians (and now against both Russia and Iran ). Here is a video of Brzezinski actually doing that -- starting the "mujahideen" (subsequently to become the Taliban) onto this 'Holy War':

https://www.youtube.com/embed/A9RCFZnWGE0?feature=oembed

Brzezinski , incidentally, had been born a Roman Catholic Polish aristocrat whose parents hated and despised Russians, and this hostility went back to the ancient conflicts between the Roman Catholic and the Russian Orthodox Churches.

So: whereas on the American end this was mainly a Roman Catholic versus Orthodox operation, it was mainly a Sunni versus Shiite operation on the Saudi end.

Here's more of the personal background regarding the co-creation, by the aristocracies of America and of Saudi Arabia, of today's jihadism, or "radical Islamic terrorism":

Whereas Nelson Rockefeller in the Republican Party sponsored Harvard's Henry Kissinger as the geostrategist and National Security Advisor, David Rockefeller in the Democratic Party sponsored Harvard's and then Columbia's Zbigniew Brzezinski as the geostrategist and National Security Advisor. The Rockefeller family was centrally involved in controlling the U.S. Government.

According to pages 41-44 of David B. Ottaway's 2008 The King's Messenger: Prince Bandar , U.S. President Jimmy Carter, whose National Security Advisor was Brzezinski, personally requested and received advice from a certain graduate student at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan al Saud, regarding geostrategy. At the time, Brzezinski commented favorably on Bandar's graduate thesis. But that's not all. "Secretly, Carter had already turned to the kingdom for help, calling in Bandar and asking him to deliver a message to [King] Fahd pleading for an increase in Saudi [oil] production. Fahd's reply, according to Bandar, was 'Tell my friend, the president of the United States of America, when they need our help, they will not be disappointed.'13 The king was true to his world." However, Bandar's advice went beyond oil. And the re-creation, of the fundamentalist-Sunni movement (amongst only fundamentalist Sunni Muslims, both in 1914 and in 1979), that now is called "jihadism," was a joint idea, from both Brzezinski and Bandar.

On 2 July 2014, Akbar Ganji headlined at Huffington Post, "U.S.-Jihadist Relations (Part 1): Creating the Mujahedin in Afghanistan" , and he noted that :

It was the United States that, together with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan, dispatched the jihadists to Afghanistan. Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia played a key role in those operations, with Saudi Arabia providing the key financial, military and human support for them. The kingdom encouraged its citizens to go to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet army. One such citizen was Osama bin Laden. Saudi Arabia agreed to match, dollar for dollar, any funds that the CIA could raise for the operations. The U.S. provided Pakistan with $3.2 billion , and Saudi Arabia bought weapons from everywhere, including international black markets, and sent them to Afghanistan through Pakistan's ISI.

That was then, and this is now, but it is merely an extension of that same operation, even after the Soviet Union and its communism and its Warsaw Pact military alliance all ended in 1991, and Russia ended its side of the Cold War but the United States secretly continued its side , as is shown here, by an example. This example, of America's continuing its Cold War, is America's longstanding effort, after the death of FDR in 1945, to overthrow and replace Syria's pro-Russian Government and install instead a Syrian Government that will be controlled by the Sauds:

U.S. President Barack Obama was warned in 2012 by U.S. DOD intelligence that if he would try to overthrow and replace Syria's secular, non-sectarian (and predominantly Shiite) Government (as the Sauds had been urging every U.S. President ever since Truman to do -- to replace those secular Shiites by fundamentalist Sunnis ), he would be able to do it only with the support of Syria's minority of fanatically Sunni fundamentalists , who were especially concentrated in Syria's northwestern province of Idlib, bordering Turkey. Obama went for the idea , and promoted it as being his attempt to 'liberate' Syria, from being led by the "barbaric" secular, non-sectarian, Shiite, Bashar al-Assad. As far back as 2009, Obama had been informed that an intense drought was ripening Syria for overthrow (regime-change), but Obama wanted to wait for his second term before he'd go all-out for this conquest. Obama didn't want his re-election chances to be clouded by possible accusations that he would be arming Al Qaeda. But, anyway, he needed to do it that way because only as late as December 2012 did Syria's domestic jihadists make clear to him that they'd go along with his plan to wage war against Assad only if they would be led by Syria's Al Qaeda, called "Al Nusra." So, this invasion began only in his second term, starting in January 2013. But the planning for the 'rebellion' -- the "Arab Spring" in Syria -- actually began in 2009 , and the U.S. State Department, under Hillary Clinton, was centrally involved . Turkey "began operations in April-May 2011" to overthrow Assad, but Obama had actually started it, Erdogan didn't. Turkey merely cooperated with it. Altogether, throughout the U.S.-initiated war in Syria, something on the order of around a hundred thousand jihadists have come into Syria from around the world so as to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Virtually all of them entered through Turkey, to its north. The influx was a trickle as late as 2013, escalated in 2014, approximately doubled in 2015, and continued escalating , but no reliable count of the incoming jihadists exists. Though Turkey was the pathway, this invasion started actually in Washington.

So, in this new 'Islamic holy war', to overthrow Syria's non-sectarian Government, the fighters entered Syria through Turkey, and they were welcomed mainly in Syria's province of Idlib, which adjoins Turkey.

On 13 March 2012, the Al Jazeera TV station, of the pro-jihad Thani royal family of Qatar, headlined "Inside Idlib: Saving Syria" , and opened

The Syrian government crackdown on the dissenting northern city of Idlib has continued for a third day, with casualties from random shelling and sniper fire mounting, and growing concerns for many citizens detained by government forces. "I can't tell you what an unequal contest this is . The phrase that we felt yesterday applied to it was 'Shooting fish in a barrel' – these people can't escape, they can't help themselves, they have very little weaponry, what can they do but sit there and take it?"

The UK Government had given Qatar to the Thanis in 1868. On 12 September 1868 , Mohammed Bin Thani signed "an agreement with the British Political Resident Col. Lewis Pelly, which was considered as the first international recognition of the sovereignty of Qatar"; so, on that precise day, Britain's Queen Victoria gave Qatar to his family, which owns it, to the present day. The Thanis are the leading financial backers of the Muslim Brotherhood, which spreads Thani influence to foreign countries. (At least up till 9/11, the Saud family have been the main financial backers of Al Qaeda .) The Thanis have been, along with the Sauds, the main financial backers of replacing the non-sectarian Syrian Government by a fundamentalist-Sunni Syrian Government. Whereas the Sauds want to control that new government, also the Thanis do, and this is one reason for the recent falling-out between those two families. America's aristocracy prefers that Syria's rulers will be selected by the Saud family, because they buy more weapons from the U.S. than does any other country. However, everything is transactional between aristocracies, and, so, international alliances can change. It's always a jostling, everyone grabbing for whatever they can get: aristocracies operate no differently than crime-families do, because FDR's dream of an anti-imperialistic U.N., which would set and enforce international laws, died when he did; we live instead in an internationally lawless world -- he died far too soon. In a sense (at least ideologically), Hitler won, but, actually, Churchill did (he was as much an imperialist as Hitler and Mussolini were).

Anyway, uncounted tens of thousands of jihadists from all over the world descended upon Syria, funded by the Sauds and the Thanis, and armed and trained by the United States, to conquer Syria. At the Syrian Government's request, Russia started bombing the jihadists on 30 September 2015 . That air-support for the Syrian Army turned the war around. By the time of 4 May 2018, Britain's Financial Times headlined "Idlib offers uncertain sanctuary to Syria's defeated rebels" ("rebels" being the U.S. and UK Governments' term for jihadists who were serving as the U.S., Saud and Thani, proxy-forces or mercenaries to conquer Syria) and reported (stenographically transmitting what the CIA and MI6 told them to say) that, "more than 70,000 rebels and civilians" -- meaning jihadists and their families -- who were "fleeing the last rebel holdout near the capital," had been given a choice, and this "choice was die in Ghouta, or leave for Idlib," and chose to get onto the Government-supplied buses taking them to Idlib. So, perhaps unnumbered hundreds of thousands of jihadists did that, from all over Syria, and collecting them in Idlib.

As I reported on 10 May 2018:

On May 8th, Syria's Government bannered, "6th batch of terrorists leave southern Damascus for northern Syria" and reported that "During the past five days, 218 buses carrying terrorists with their families exited from the three towns to Jarablos and Idleb under the supervision of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent." Jarablos (or " Jarabulus ") is a town or "District" in the Aleppo Governate; and Idleb (or " Idlib ") is the capital District in the adjoining Governate of Idlib, which Governate is immediately to the west of Aleppo Governate; and both Jarabulus and Idlib border on Turkey to the north. Those two towns in Syria's far northwest are where captured jihadists are now being sent.

The Government is doing that because at this final stage in the 7-year-long war, it wants civilian deaths and additional destruction of buildings to be kept to a minimum, and so is offering jihadists the option of surviving instead of being forced to fight to the death (which would then require Syria's Government to destroy the entire area that's occupied by the terrorists); this way, these final clean-up operations against the terrorists won't necessarily require bombing whole neighborhoods -- surrenders thus become likelier, so as to end the war as soon as possible, and to keep destruction and civilian casualties at a minimum.

The Syrian and Russian Governments had planned to finish them off there in Idlib, so that none of them could escape back into their home countries to continue their jihad. However, the U.S. and its allies raised 'humanitarian' screams at the U.N. and other international organizations, in order to protect the 'rebels' against the 'barbarous dictator' of Syria, its President, Bashar al-Assad -- just in order to create more anti-Assad (and anti-Russian, and anti-Iranian) propaganda. And, so, on 9 and 10 September 2018, Putin and Erdogan and Rouhani met in Rouhani's Tehran to decide what to do. By that time, Erdogan was riding the fence between Washington and Moscow. On 17 September 2018, I headlined "Putin and Erdogan Plan Syria-Idlib DMZ as I Recommended" and reported that Putin and Rouhani entrusted Idlib to Erdogan, with the expectation that Erdogan would keep the jihadists penned-up there, so that Putin and Assad would be able to bomb them to hell after the 'humanitarian crisis' in Idlib would be no longer on front pages.

As things turned out, Erdogan double-crossed Putin and Rouhani, and just grabbed the territory .

The role of the United Nations in this has been to stand aside and pretend that it's a 'humanitarian crisis' (as the U.S. regime wanted it to be called) instead of a U.S.-and-allied invasion, aggressive war, and consequently a vast war-crime such as Hitler's top leaders were prosecuted and executed for at Nuremberg. As Miri Wood wrote, at Syria News, on 28 February 2018 :

Members of the General Assembly must be in good financial standing to vote. Dues are on a sliding scale but do not factor in draconian sanctions against targeted members, nor crimes of war involved in their destruction. As such, CAR, Libya, Venezuela and Yemen have been stripped of their voting rights. The non-permanent SC members function as obedient House Servants to the P3 bullies, ever mindful of placing self-preservation above moral integrity .

So Truman's U.N. turns out to be on the side of the new Nazism, against its victims.

Erdogan wants to be with the winners. He evidently believes that whatever empire he'll be able to have will be just a vassal nation within the U.S. Empire. He had been extremely reluctant to accept this viewpoint , but, apparently, he now does. And so, now, Erdogan has become so confident that he has the backing of Christian-majority America and of Christian-majority Europe, so that Turkey's Hagia Sophia , which had been "the world's largest cathedral for nearly a thousand years, until Seville Cathedral was completed in 1520," has finally become officially declared by the Turkish Government to be, instead, a mosque. He feels safe enough to insult the publics in the other NATO countries so as to be able now to assert publicly his support for Islam against Christianity, because he knows that NATO's other aristocracies -- all of them majority-Christian, and all of these aristocrats ruling their respective Christian-majority countries -- don't really give a damn about that. Amongst themselves, the concern for 'heaven' is all just for show, because they are far more interested to buy Paradise in the here-and-now, for themselves and for their families. As for any possible 'afterlife', it will be reflected in the big buildings and charities that will bear their names, after they're gone. Erdogan feels safe, knowing that they're all psychopaths. And, as for the publics anywhere -- Syria, Libya, even in Turkey itself -- they don't matter, to him, any more than they do to the leaders of those other NATO countries.

Consequently, too, on July 18th, the American Herald Tribune headlined "As It Did in Libya, Turkey Recruits Syrian Militants to Fight in Azerbaijan" , and Khaled Iskef, a journalist for Beirut's Almaydeen TV, reported, based on unnamed "private sources in the northern countryside of Aleppo," that

Turkish forces started recruiting numbers of its armed fighters to send them to Azerbaijan in order to assist the Azerbaijani forces in confronting the Armenian army.

According to sources, Turkey opened special promotion offices in different parts of Afrin northern Aleppo, to attract the militants and encourage them to sign contracts by which they would move to fight in Azerbaijan for a period of six months, renewable in case they wanted to.

According to the contract, the militants receive a monthly salary of $2500, while the advantage of granting Turkish citizenship to the families of the militants in case they died is absent, contrary to the contracts that Turkey had signed with the armed men who wanted to move to Libya.

The sources said that Turkey has designated centers for registering militants wishing to fight in Azerbaijan within the towns of Genderes and Raju, along with Afrin city, and these centers have already started receiving requests by the militants.

Armenia is virtually 100% Christian, and, according to Wikipedia :

The Armenian Genocide [c] (also known as the Armenian Holocaust ) [13] was the systematic mass murder and expulsion of 1.5 million [b] ethnic Armenians carried out in Turkey and adjoining regions by the Ottoman government between 1914 and 1923. [14] [15] The starting date is conventionally held to be 24 April 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities rounded up, arrested, and deported from Constantinople (now Istanbul) to the region of Angora ( Ankara ), 235 to 270 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders , the majority of whom were eventually murdered.

So, the recruitment of fundamentalist-Sunni mercenaries in the areas of Syria that Turkey has captured, and sending those men "to assist the Azerbaijani forces in confronting the Armenian army," is likewise consistent with the NATO member-country Turkey's restoration of its former Ottoman Empire. Using these jihadist proxy-soldiers, NATO is now invading Christian Armenia.

However, Iskef was reporting without paying any attention to the aristocratic interests which were actually very much involved in what Erdogan was doing here. On July 19th, Cyril Widdershoven at the "Oil Price" site bannered "The Forgotten Conflict That Is Threatening Energy Markets" and he reported the economic geostrategic factors which were at stake in this now-emerging likely hot war, which is yet another "pipeline war," and which pits Turkey against Russia. In this particular matter, Turkey has an authentic economic reason to become engaged in a possible hot war allied with Muslim Azerbaijan against Christian Armenia. Russia, yet again, would be backing Christian soldiers. Of course, NATO, also yet again, would be on the Muslim side, against the Christians. But, this time, NATO would be backing Azerbaijan, which is 85% Shiite. Consequently, in such a conflict, the U.S. could end up on the same side as Iran, and against Russia.

If history is any guide, aristocratic interests will take precedence over theocratic interests, but democratic interests -- the interests of the publics that are involved -- will be entirely ignored. The sheer hypocrisy of the U.S. regime exceeds anything in human history.

How can anybody not loathe the U.S. regime and its allies? Only by getting one's 'news' from its 'news'-media -- especially (but not only) its mainstream ones.

[Jul 26, 2020] Patriotic Dissent- How A Working-Class Soldier Turned Against -Forever Wars- -

Jul 26, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Patriotic Dissent: How A Working-Class Soldier Turned Against "Forever Wars"


by Tyler Durden Sat, 07/25/2020 - 00:05 Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print

Authored by Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon via Counterpunch.org,

When it comes to debate about US military policy, the 2020 presidential election campaign is so far looking very similar to that of 2016. Joe Biden has pledged to ensure that "we have the strongest military in the world," promising to "make the investments necessary to equip our troops for the challenges of the next century, not the last one."

In the White House, President Trump is repeating the kind of anti-interventionist head feints that won him votes four years ago against a hawkish Hillary Clinton. In his recent graduation address at West Point, Trump re-cycled applause lines from 2016 about "ending an era of endless wars" as well as America's role as "policeman of the world."

In reality, since Trump took office, there's been no reduction in the US military presence abroad, which last year required a Pentagon budget of nearly $740 billion. As military historian and retired career officer Andrew Bacevich notes , "endless wars persist (and in some cases have even intensified ); the nation's various alliances and its empire of overseas bases remain intact; US troops are still present in something like 140 countries ; Pentagon and national security state spending continues to increase astronomically ."

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When the National Defense Authorization Act for the next fiscal year came before Congress this summer, Senator Bernie Sanders proposed a modest 10 percent reduction in military spending so $70 billion could be re-directed to domestic programs. Representative Barbara Lee introduced a House resolution calling for $350 billion worth of DOD cuts. Neither proposal has gained much traction, even among Democrats on Capitol Hill. Instead, the House Armed Services Committee just voted 56 to 0 to spend $740. 5 billion on the Pentagon in the coming year, prefiguring the outcome of upcoming votes by the full House and Senate.

An Appeal to Conscience

Even if Biden beats Trump in November, efforts to curb US military spending will face continuing bi-partisan resistance. In the never-ending work of building a stronger anti-war movement, Pentagon critics, with military credentials, are invaluable allies. Daniel Sjursen, a 37-year old veteran of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan is one such a critic. Inspired in part by the much-published Bacevich, Sjursen has just written a new book called Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War (Heyday Books)

Patriotic Dissent is a short volume, just 141 pages, but it packs the same kind of punch as Howard Zinn's classic 1967 polemic, Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal . Like Zinn, who became a popular historian after his service in World War II, Sjursen skillfully debunks the conventional wisdom of the foreign policy establishment, and the military's own current generation of "yes men for another war power hungry president." His appeal to the conscience of fellow soldiers, veterans, and civilians is rooted in the unusual arc of an eighteen-year military career. His powerful voice, political insights, and painful personal reflections offer a timely reminder of how costly, wasteful, and disastrous our post 9/11 wars have been.

Sjursen has the distinction of being a graduate of West Point, an institution that produces few political dissenters. He grew up in a fire-fighter family on working class Staten Island. Even before enrolling at the Academy at age 17, he was no stranger to what he calls "deep-seated toxically masculine patriotism." As a newly commissioned officer in 2005, he was still a "burgeoning neo-conservative and George W. Bush admirer" and definitely not, he reports, any kind of "defeatist liberal, pacifist, or dissenter."

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Sjursen's initial experience in combat -- vividly described in his first book, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of The Surge (University Press of New England) -- "occurred at the statistical height of sectarian strife" in Iraq.

"The horror, the futility, the farce of that war was the turning point in my life," Sjursen writes in Patriotic Dissent .

When he returned, at age 24, from his "brutal, ghastly deployment" as a platoon leader, he "knew that the war was built on lies, ill-advised, illegal, and immoral." This "unexpected, undesired realization generated profound doubts about the course and nature of the entire American enterprise in the Greater Middle East -- what was then unapologetically labeled the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT)."

A Professional Soldier

By the time Sjursen landed in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, in early 2011, he had been promoted to captain but "no longer believed in anything we were doing."

He was, he confesses, "simply a professional soldier -- a mercenary, really -- on a mandatory mission I couldn't avoid. Three more of my soldiers died, thirty-plus were wounded, including a triple amputee, and another over-dosed on pain meds after our return."

Despite his disillusionment, Sjursen had long dreamed of returning to West Point to teach history. He applied for and won that highly competitive assignment, which meant the Army had to send him to grad school first. He ended up getting credentialed, while living out of uniform, in the "People's Republic of Lawrence, Kansas, a progressive oasis in an intolerant, militarist sea of Republican red." During his studies at the state university, Sjursen found an intellectual framework for his "own doubts about and opposition to US foreign policy." He completed his first book, Ghost Riders , which combines personal memoir with counter-insurgency critique. Amazingly enough, it was published in 2015, while he was still on active duty, but with "almost no blowback" from superior officers.

Before retiring as a major four years later, Sjursen pushed the envelope further, by writing more than 100 critical articles for TomDispatch and other civilian publications. He was no longer at West Point so that body of work triggered "a grueling, stressful, and scary four-month investigation"by the brass at Fort Leavenworth, during which the author was subjected to "a non-publication order." At risk were his career, military pension, and benefits. He ended up receiving only a verbal admonishment for violating a Pentagon rule against publishing words "contemptuous of the President of the United States." His "PTSD and co-occurring diagnoses" helped him qualify for a medical retirement last year.

Sjursen has now traded his "identity as a soldier -- the only identity I've known in my adult life -- for that of an anti-war, anti-imperialist, social justice crusader," albeit one who did not attend his first protest rally until he was thirty-two years old. With several left-leaning comrades, he started Fortress on A Hill, a lively podcast about military affairs and veterans' issues. He's a frequent, funny, and always well-informed guest on progressive radio and cable-TV shows, as well as a contributing editor at Antiwar.com , and a contributor to a host of mainstream liberal publications. This year, the Lannan Foundation made him a cultural freedom fellow.

In Patriotic Dissent , Sjursen not only recounts his own personal trajectory from military service to peace activism. He shows how that intellectual journey has been informed by reading and thinking about US history, the relationship between civil society and military culture, the meaning of patriotism, and the price of dissent.

One historical figure he admires is Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, the recipient of two Medals of Honor for service between 1898 and 1931. Following his retirement, Butler sided with the poor and working-class veterans who marched on Washington to demand World War I bonus payments. And he wrote a best-selling Depression-era memoir, which famously declared that "war is just a racket" and lamented his own past role as "a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers."

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Sjursen contrasts Butler's anti-interventionist whistle-blowing, nearly a century ago, with the silence of high-ranking veterans today after "nineteen years of ill-advised, remarkably unsuccessful American wars." Among friends and former West Point classmates, he knows many still serving who "obediently resign themselves to continued combat deployments" because they long ago "stopped asking questions about their own role in perpetuating and enabling a counter-productive, inertia-driven warfare state."

Sjursen looks instead to small left-leaning groups like Veterans for Peace and About Face: Veterans Against the War (formerly Iraq Veterans Against the War), and Bring Our Troops Home. US, a network of veterans influenced by the libertarian right. Each in, its own way, seeks to "reframe dissent, against empire and endless war, as the truest form of patriotism." But actually taming the military-industrial complex will require "big-tent, intersectional action from civilian and soldier alike," on a much larger scale. One obstacle to that, he believes, is the societal divide between the "vast majority of citizens who have chosen not to serve" in the military and the "one percent of their fellow citizens on active duty," who then become part of "an increasingly insular, disconnected, and sometimes sententious post-9/11 veteran community."

Not many on the left favor a return to conscription.

But Sjursen makes it clear there's been a downside to the U.S. replacing "citizen soldiering" with "a tiny professional warrior caste," created in response to draft-driven dissent against the Vietnam War, inside and outside the military. As he observes:

"Nothing so motivates a young adult to follow foreign policy, to weigh the advisability or morality of an ongoing war as the possibility of having to put 'skin in the game.' Without at least the potential requirement to serve in the military and in one of America's now countless wars, an entire generation -- or really two, since President Nixon ended the draft in 1973–has had the luxury of ignoring the ills of U.S. foreign policy, to distance themselves from its reality ."

At a time when the U.S. "desperately needs a massive, public, empowered anti-war and anti-imperial wave" sweeping over the country, we have instead a "civil-military" gap that, Sjursen believes, has "stifled antiwar and anti-imperial dissent and seemingly will continue to do so." That's why his own mission is to find more "socially conscious veterans of these endless, fruitless wars" who are willing to "step up and form a vanguard of sorts for revitalized patriotic dissent." Readers of Sjursen's book, whether new recruits to that vanguard or longtime peace activists, will find Patriotic Dissent to be an invaluable educational tool. It should be required reading in progressive study groups, high school and college history classes, and book clubs across the country . Let's hope that the author's willingness to take personal risks, re-think his view of the world, and then work to change it will inspire many others, in uniform and out.

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Justus_Americans , 59 minutes ago

Do we need to be in 160 countries with our military and can we afford it?

Cat Daddy , 1 hour ago

I am all for bringing the troops home except for this one unnerving truth; nature abhors a vacuum, specifically, when we pull out, China moves in. A world dominated by the CCP will be a dangerous place to be. When we leave, we will need to make sure our bases are safely in the hands of our friends.

dogbert8 , 1 hour ago

War is effectively the way the U.S. has done business since the Spanish American War, our first imperial conquests. War is how we ensure big business has the materials and markets they demand in return for their support of political parties and candidates. War is the only area left with opportunities for growth and profit. Don't think for a minute that TPTB will ever let us stop waging war to get what we (they) want.

TheLastMan , 2 hours ago

If you are new to zh all you need to do is study PNAC and the related nature of all parties to understand the criminality of USA militarization and for whose benefit it serves

Anonymous IX , 2 hours ago

I have written many times on this platform the exact same sentiments.

I am most disheartened by the COVID + Antifa/BLM Riots because of the facts this author presents.

We are distracted with emotional and highly volatile MASSIVELY PROPAGANDIZED stories by MSM (I don't watch) while the real problem in the world is as the author describes above.

We are war-mongering nation who needs to bring our troops home and disband over half of our overseas installations and bases.

We have no right to levy economic sanctions to impoverish, sicken, and weaken the citizens of Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, or anywhere else.

Yet, we run around arguing about masks and who can go into a restaurant or toppling statutes and throwing mortar-type fireworks at federal officers. This is what we do instead of facing a real problem which is that we are war-mongering nation with no moral/ethical conscience. These scraggily bearded white Antifas need to WTFU and realize who their true enemy.

Oh, wait. They work for the true enemy! Get it?

Max21c , 1 hour ago

We have no right to levy economic sanctions to impoverish, sicken, and weaken the citizens of Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, or anywhere else.

I don't agree with the economic sanctions nonsense thing as they seem to be more of a crutch for people that are not any good at planning, strategy, analytical thinking, critical thinking, strategic thinking, and lack much in the way of talent or creativity or intellectual acumen or intellectual skills...I believe there's around just shy of 10k economic sanctions by Washington...

But the USA does have the right to receive or refuse to receive foreign Ambassadors and Consuls and to recognize or not recognize other nations governments thus it does have some degrees of the right to not trade or engage in commerce with other nations to a certain extent... per imports and exports... et cetera... though it's not necessarily an absolute right or power

IronForge , 2 hours ago

Sjursen may admire General Butler; but he doesn't seem to know that several of the General's Descendants Served in the US Military.

Sjursen isn't Butler. The General Prevented a Coup in his Time.

The USA are a Hegemony whose KleptOchlarchs overtook the Original Constitutional Republic.

PetroUSD, MIC, Corporate Expansion-Conquest, AgriGMO, and Pharma Interests Span the Globe.

Wars are Rackets; and Societies to Nation-States have waged them over Real Estate, Natural Resources, Trade Routes, Industrial Capacity, Slavery, Suppresive Spite, Religious/Ideological Zeal, Economic Preservation, and Profiteering Greed.

YET, Militaries are still formed by Nation-States to Survive and for Some - Thrive above such Competitive Existenstential Threats.

*****

The Hegemony are running up against New Shifts in Global Power, Systems, and Influences; and are about to Lose their Unilateral Advantages. The Hegemon themselves may suffer Societal Collapses Within.

Sjursen should read up on Chalmers Johnson. Instead of trying to Coordinate Ineffective Peace Demonstrations, the Entire Voting/Political Contribution/Candidacy Schemes should be Separated from the Oligarchy of Plutocrats and Corporate/Political KleptOchlarchs.

Without Bringing the Votes back to the Collective Hands of Citizenry Interests First and Foremost, the Republic are Forever Conquered; and the Ethical may have to resort to Emigration and/or Secession.

Ink Pusher , 2 hours ago

Nobody rides for free,there's always a cost and those who can't pay in bullion will often pay in bodily fluids of one form or another.

Profiteers that create warfare for profit are simply parasitical criminals and should not be considered a "special breed" when weighed upon the Scales of Justice.

gzorp , 2 hours ago

Read 'Starship Troopers' by Robert A Heinlein (1959) pay especial attention to the "History and Moral Philosophy" courses... that's where his predictions for the future course of 'America's' future appear.... rather accurately. Heinlein was a 1930's graduate of Annapolis (Navy for you dindus and nohabs).....

A DUDE , 2 hours ago

t's not just the war machine but the entire system, the corporatocracy, of which the MIC is a part. And there is no way to change the system from within the system because whatever is anti-establishment becomes absorbed and neutered and part of the system.

So why would anyone vote is my question? 11. Trump and Biden Are Far Right of Center and Running to Offenbach Nearly Every Day

sbin , 2 hours ago

Tulsi Gabbard ran on anti interventionism foreign policy.

Look how fast the DNC disappeared her.

Of course destroying Kamala Harris in a debate and going after the ancient evil Hitlery sealed her fate.

BarkingWolf , 2 hours ago

In reality, since Trump took office, there's been no reduction in the US military presence abroad, which last year required a Pentagon budget of nearly $740 billion. As military historian and retired career officer Andrew Bacevich notes , "endless wars persist (and in some cases have even intensified ); the nation's various alliances and its empire of overseas bases remain intact; US troops are still present in something like 140 countries ; Pentagon and national security state spending continues to increase astronomically ."

Now wait just a minute there mister, that sounds like criticism of the Donald John PBUH PBUH PBUH ... you can't do that ... the cult followers will call you a leftist and a commie if you point out stuff like that even if it is objectively true! That's strike one, punk.

An Appeal to Conscience

Even if Biden beats Trump in November, efforts to curb US military spending will face continuing bi-partisan resistance.

November doesn't have anything to do with anything really. The appeal to conscience is wasted. The appeal would be better spent on removing the political class that is on the AIPAC dole and have dual citizenship in a foreign country in the ME while pretending to serve America while they are members of Congress. That's only the tip of the spear ... and that is a nonstarter from the get go.

Sjursen skillfully debunks the conventional wisdom of the foreign policy establishment, and the military's own current generation of "yes men for another war power hungry president."


I don't think Trump is necessarily a war power hungry president. While it is true that we have not withdrawn from Syria and basically stole their oil as Trump has repeated promised he would do, it is also true that Trump has yet to deliver Israels war with Iran and in fact had called back an invasion of Iran ten minutes before a flotilla of US warships was about to set sail to ignite such an invasion leaving Tel Aviv not only aggrieved, but angry as well.

Sjursen has now traded his "identity as a soldier -- the only identity I've known in my adult life -- for that of an anti-war, anti-imperialist, social justice crusader," albeit one who did not attend his first protest rally until he was thirty-two years old. With several left-leaning comrades ...

Okay, this is where you are starting to lose me .... i't like listening to a concert and suddenly the music is hitting sour notes that are off key, off tempo, and don't seem to fit somehow.

Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, the recipient of two Medals of Honor for service between 1898 and 1931. Following his retirement, Butler sided with the poor and working-class veterans who marched on Washington to demand World War I bonus payments. And he wrote a best-selling Depression-era memoir, which famously declared that "war is just a racket" and lamented his own past role as "a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers."

"On July 28, 1932, at the command of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, they marched down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol to launch an attack on World War I veterans. " https://www.stripes.com/news/us/the-veterans-were-desperate-gen-macarthur-ordered-us-troops-to-attack-them-1.480665

Butler was correct, war especially nowadays, is a racket that makes rich people who never seem to get their hands dirty, even richer. As one grunt put it long ago, "it's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it."

That "somebody" is going to be the kids of the little people (the real high-class muscle-men ) who are hated by their political class overlords even as the political class are worshipped as gods.

Sjursen looks instead to small left-leaning groups like Veterans for Peace and About Face: Veterans Against the War (formerly Iraq Veterans Against the War), and Bring Our Troops Home. US, a network of veterans influenced by the libertarian right.

The problem here is that the so-called "left" brand has always been about war and the capitalism of death.

The Democrat party is really the group that started the American civil war for instance, they are the ones behind legacy of Eugenists like Margaret Sanger who was a card carrying Socialist who founded the child murder mill known today as Planned Parenthood that sadly still exists under Trump but has turned into the industrialized slaughter of children ...even after birth so that their organs can be "harvested" for profit.

Sjursen's affinity for "the left" as saintly purveyors of peace, goodness, love, and life strikes me as rather disingenuous. Then he seems to argue if I read the analysis correctly that conscription will somehow be the panacea for the insatiable appetite for war?

One false flag such as The Gulf of Tonkin or 911 or even Perl Harbor or the Sinking of the Lusitania or the assassination of an Arch Duke ... is all that is really needed to arouse the unbridled hoards to march off to battle with almost erotic enthusiasm -the political class KNOWS IT!

Amendment X , 2 hours ago

And don't forget President Wilson (D) who was re-elected on the platform "He kept us out of the war" only to drag U.S. into the hopeless European Monarchary driven WWI.

11b40 , 1 hour ago

Yo! Low class muscle man here, and I have to agree with bringing back the draft. It should never have been eliminated, and is the root of the golbalists abiity to keep us in Afghanistan, and other parts of the ME, for going on 20 years.

Skin in the game. It means literally everything. As noted we now have 2 generations of men who never had to give much thought at all to what's happening around the world, and how America is involved....and look at the results. It would be a much different situation today if all those 18 year olds had to face the draft board with an unforgiving lottery.

Yes, one false falg can whip up the country to a war time fever pitch, but unless there is a real, serious threat, the fever cannot be maintained. The 1969 draft lottery caught me when I stayed out the first semester of my senior year. Didn't want to go, but accepted my fate and did the best job I could to stay alive and keep those around me as safe as possible. In 1966, I was in favor of the war, and was about to go Green Beret on the buddy system. We were going to grease gooks with all the enthusiasm of John Wayne. My old man, an artillery 1st Sgt at the time in Germany, talked me out of it. More like get your *** on a plane back to the States and into college, befroe i kick it up around your shouders. A WW2 & Korea vet, he told me then it was the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

The point is, when kids are getting drafted, Mom's, Dad's, and everyone else concerned with the safety of their friends & relatives, start paying attention and asking hard questions of politicians. Using Afghanistan as an example, we would have been on the way out by the 2004 election cycle, or at max before the next one in 2008. That was 12 years ago, and we are still there.

I addition, the reason we went would have been more closely examined, and there may have been a real investigtion into 9/11. Plus, I am convinced that serving your country makes for a better all around citizen, and God knows, we need better citizens.

Cassandra.Hermes , 2 hours ago

Trump and Pompeo started new cold war with China, but have no way to back up their threats and win it!! When i was in Kosovo peace corps i heard so many stories from Albanian who were blamed to be Russian or American spy because of double cold war against Albania. Trump and Pompeo just gave excuse to Xi to blame anyone who protest as American spy. BBC were showing China's broadcast of the protests in Oregon to Hong Kong with subtitle "Do you really want American democracy?", LMFAO

Max21c , 2 hours ago

Joe Biden has pledged to ensure that "we have the strongest military in the world," promising to "make the investments necessary to equip our troops for the challenges of the next century, not the last one."

The United States shall continue to have a weak military until it starts to fix its foreign policy and diplomacy. You cannot have the strongest military in the world if you lack a good foreign policy and good diplomacy. Brains are a lot more important than battleships, battalions, bullets, barrels, or bombs. Get a frickin' clue you friggin' Washington morons.

Washington is weak because they are dumb. Blind, deaf, and dumb.

Heroic Couplet , 2 hours ago

Too little, too late. Great ad for a book that will be forgotten in a week. Read Bolton's book. The minute Trump tries to reduce troops, Bolton is right there, saying "No, we can't move troops to the perimeter. No, we can't move troops from barracks to tents at the perimeter." Who needs AI?

Erik Prince wrote 3.5 years ago that 4th gen warfare consists of cyberwarfare and bio-weapons. The US military is fooked. There's probably an interesting book to be researched: How do Republicans feel about contracting COVID-19 after listening to Trump fumble?

ChecksandBalances , 3 hours ago

Blame the voters. Run on a platform to reduce military and police spending. See how many of those lose. Probably all of them. You have to stop feeding the beast. This is a slogan Trump correctly said but as usual didn't actually mean. We should cut all military and police spending by 1/2 and then take the remaining money and build a smarter, more efficient military and police force.

Max21c , 3 hours ago

It's not just the "Deep State." It's Washingtonians overall. It's Deep Crazy. They're all Deep Crazy! They're nuts. And the rare exceptions that may know better and have enough common sense to know its wrong to sick the secret police on innocent American civilians aren't going to say anything or do anything to stop it. The few that know better in foreign policy aren't going to say anything or do anything against the new Cold Wars on the Eastern Front against China or on the Western Front against Russia since they're not willing to go up against the Regime. So the Regimists know they have carte blanche to persecute or terrorize or go after any that stand in their way. This is how tyrannies and police states operate. It's the nature of the beast. At a minimum they brow beat people into submission. People don't want to stick their neck out and risk going up against the Regime and risk losing to the Regime, its secret police, and the powers that be. They shy away from anything that would bring the Regime and its secret police and its radicals, extremists, fanatics, and zealots their way.

nonkjo , 4 hours ago

It's okay to be against "forever war" and still not have to be a progressive douchbag.

Sjursen is an unprincipled ******** artist. He leaves Iraq disillusioned as a lieutenant but sticks around long enough for them to pay for his grad school and give him some sweet "resume building" experiences that he can stand on to sell books? FYI, from commissioning time as a second lieutenant to promotion to captain is 3 years...that means Sjusen was so disillusioned that he decided to stick around for 12 more years which is about 9 years longer than he actually needed to as an Academy grad (he only had to serve 6 unless he elected to go to grad school).

The bottom line is Sjusen capitalizes on people not knowing how the military works. That is, that his own self-interest far outweighs his the principles he espouses. Typical leftist hypoctite.

Max21c , 4 hours ago

...the U.S. "desperately needs a massive, public, empowered anti-war and anti-imperial wave ..."

Perhaps the USA just needs a better foreign policy. Though we all know that's not going to happen with the flaky screwballs of Washington and the flaky screwballs in the Pentagon, CIA, State Department, foreign policy establishment, think tanks et cetera.

Minor technical point: the time for the "anti-imperial wave" was before Washingtonians destroyed much of the world and created their strategic blunders and disastrous foreign policy. You folks all went along with this nonsense and now you have your quagmires, forever wars, and numerous trouble spots that have popped up here and there along the way to boot.

Pottery barn rule: you broke it and you own it and it's yours...Ma'am please pay at the register on the way out...Sorry Ma'am there's no more free gluing...though the gluing specialist may be in on the third Thursday this month though it's usually the second Tuesday each month...

Contemporaneously, in the same vein the American public has been brainwashed into going along with the new Cold Wars on the Western Front against Moscow and the even newer Cold War on the Eastern Front against Beijing. It's like P.T. Barnum said "There's a sucker born every minute," and you fools in the American public just keep buying right in to the brainwashing. They're now successfully indoctrinating you into buying into their new Cold Wars with Russia and China. The Cold War on the Eastern Front versus Peking is more getting more fanciful attentions at the moment and the Cold War on the Western Front has temporarily been relegated to the back burner but they'll move the Western Front Cold War from simmer to boil over whenever it suits their needs. It's just a rendition of the Oceania has always been at war with East Asia and Eurasia is our friend are just gameplays right out of George Orwell's 1984.

Most of the quagmires can be fixed to a certain extent by applying some cement and engineering to the quicksand and many of the trouble spots can become more settled and less unstable if not stable in some instances. Even some of the more serious strategic problems like the South China Sea, North Korean nuclear weapons development, and potential Iranian nuclear weapons development can still be resolved through peaceful strategies and solutions.

In re sum, while I won't disparage a peace movement I do not believe it is either necessary nor proper simply because you will not solve anything through a peace movement. The sine qua non or quintessential element is simply to end one of these wars successfully through a peaceful diplomatic solution or solve one of these serious foreign policy problems through diplomacy which is something that hasn't been the norm since the downfall of the Berlin Wall, is no longer in favor, and which is the necessary element to prove that peace can be achieved through strategy and diplomacy and thereby change the course of the country's future.

In foreign affairs the foreign policy establishment has its pattern of behavior and it is that pattern of behavior that has to be changed. It's the mindset of the Washingtonians & elites that has to be changed. Just taking to the streets won't really change their ways or their beliefs for any significant part of the duration. They may pay lip service to peace & diplomacy but it won't win out in their minds in the long run. They are so warped in their views and beliefs that it'll have little or no effect over the long haul. As soon as the protests dissipate they'll be right back at it, back to their bad ways and bad behavior.

Son of Captain Nemo , 4 hours ago

For the past 19 years... And as Anti-War as you will ever get!...

https://action.ae911truth.org/p/salsa/web/common/public/signup?signup_page_KEY=11418&killorg=True&loggedOut=True

https://www.ae911truth.org/grandjury

P.S.

Remind 0range $hit $tain ( https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/11/14/trump-im-reopening-911-investigation/ ) that if he makes this a campaign pledge and an issue for debate he maybe can avoid a war crimes tribunal given how much has already been spent on the war machine ( https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/944-trillion-reasons-why-fed-quietly-bailing-out-hedge-funds )!

Hatterasjohn , 4 hours ago

Was it George Carlin that said " if voting made a difference they wouldn't let us do it " ? The only way to stop these forever wars is for people to stop joining the military. Parents should teach their children that joining the military and trotting off to some country to fight a war for the elite is not being patriotic . I was in the military from 1964 -1968. When Lyndon Johnson became president he drug out the Vietnam war as long as he could. Oh ! Lady Byrd Johnson bought Decon Company [ rat poison ] when most people never heard of it. Johnson bought this rat poison , government paid for ,at an inflated price . Sent ship loads of it to Vietnam .Never mind all the Americans and so called enemy killed.. Jane Fonda , Hanoi Jane , was really a hero who helped save countless lives by helping to end the war. Tommy and **** Smothers , Smother Brothers , spoke out against the war . Our government had them black balled from TV. Our government is probably as corrupt as any other country.

No-Go zone , 5 hours ago

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03-19/top-us-general-says-american-troops-should-be-ready-die-israel

cowboyted , 7 hours ago

A piece of irony, one of our greatest generals was Dwight Eisenhower, the Allied Supreme Commander in WWII and two term president. He kept the peace for almost 10 years and warned Americans to beware of the "military-industrial complex." Most military men never want war, they just make sure they are ready if it comes. We have had the military industrial complex for way too long, it needs to be reduced and we need more generals to run for president, Gen. Flynn maybe? I'll also take Schwartzkoff.

cowboyted , 7 hours ago

The U.S. should only use our military if we are attacked, period. Otherwise, as Jefferson astutely stated, a standing army is a threat to democracy.

captain noob , 7 hours ago

Capitalism has no morals

Profit is the driving force of every single thing

cowboyted , 7 hours ago

The U.S. should only use our military if we are attacked, period. Otherwise, as Jefferson astutely stated, a standing army is a threat to democracy.

Chief Joesph , 7 hours ago

After what General Smedley Butler had to say and warned us about, here we are, 90 years later, doing the very same thing. Goes to show how utterly dumb, unprogressive, sheepish, and Medieval Americans really are. And you thought this is what makes America Great????

cowboyted , 8 hours ago

The U.S. Constitution provides for a "national defense." Yet, the last time we were attacked by a foreign nation was on Dec. 7, 1941 in which, the Congress declared war on Japan. Yet, in the past 100 years our country's leaders have convinced Americans that we can wage war if the issue concerns our "national INTEREST." This is wrong and needs to be deleted and replaced with our Constitution's language. Also, Congress is the ONLY Constitutional authority to declare war, not the executive branch. Too many countries, including the U.S., spend too much money preparing for war on levels of destruction that are unnecessary. We must attain a new paradigm with leading countries to achieve a mutual understanding that the people of the world are better off with jobs, food, families, peace, and a chance at a better life, filled with hope, faith, and flourishing communities. Things have to change.

transcendent_wannabe , 8 hours ago

I have to agree in sentiment with the author, but the reality of humans on earth almost demands constant war, it is the price we pay for the modern city lifestyle. There are various reasons.

1. Ever since WW1, the country has become citified, and the old peaceful country farm life was replaced with the rat race of industrial production. Without war, there is no need for the level of industrial production required to give full employment to the overpopulated cities. People will scream for war and jingoism when they have no city jobs. How do you deal with that? Sure, War is a Racket, but so far a necessary racket.

2. Every 20 years the military needs a real shooting war to battle test its upcoming soldiers and new equipment. Now the battles are against insurgencies... door-to-door in cities and ghettos, and new tactics need to be field tested. If the military goes more than 20 years without a real shooting war, they lose the real men, the sargeant majors, who just become fat pot bellied desk personel without the adrenaline of a real fight.

3. Humans inately like to fight. Even children, boys wrestle, girls taunt one another. There is no way discovered yet to keep people from turning violent in their attempts to steal what others have, or to gain dominance thru physical intimidation. Without war, gangs will form and fight over territorial boundaries. There is no escaping it.

4. Earth is where the battle field is, Battlefield Earth. There is no fighting allowed in heaven, so Earth is where souls come to fight. Nobody on earth likes it, but fighting and war is here to stay, and you should really use this life to find out how to transcend earth and get to a place where war is not needed or allowed, like heaven or Valhalla.

Tortuga , 8 hours ago

So. He thinks the crooked, grifting, regressive hate US murdering dim pustules aren't the warmongering, globalist, hate US, crooked, grifting, murdering republicrats. What a mo ron.

HenryJonesJr , 8 hours ago

Real conservatives were always against foreign intervention. It was the Left that embraced foreign wars (Wilson / Roosevelt / Truman / Johnson).

messystateofaffairs , 8 hours ago

From my perspective being a professional goon to serve the greater glory of international criminals, is, aside from having to avoid the mirror, way too much hard and dangerous work for the money. As a civilian of a society run by criminals on criminal imperialist principles, I have no literal PTSD type of skin in that filthy game, but like most citizens, knowing and unknowing, I do swim in that sewer everyday, doing my best to avoid bumping into the larger turds. My "patriotism" lies where the turds are fewest, anywhere in the world that might be.

bh2 , 8 hours ago

The threat to US interests is not in the ME (apart from Israel). It's in the Pacific.

NATO was never intended to be a defense arrangement perpetually funded by the US. Once stood up and post-war economies in Europe were restored, it was supposed to be a European defense shield with the US as ultimate backup. Not as a sugar-daddy for wealthy nations. Now that Russia is no longer situated to attack through the Fulda Gap, NATO is a grotesque expression of Parkinson's Law writ large.

China is a real threat to US interests. That's obvious simply by consulting a map. Military assets committed to engagement in theaters that no longer seriously matter is feckless and spendthrift. Particularly when Americans are put in harm's way with no prospect of either winning or leaving.

Worse yet is the accelerating prospect of being drawn into conflict in the South China Sea because fewer than decisive US and allied assets are deployed there.

While nations are now responding to that threat (including Japan, who are re-arming), China must realize a successful Taiwan invasion faces steadily diminishing prospects. They must act soon or give up the opportunity. Moreover, the CCP are loosing face with their own people because of multiple calamities wreaking havoc. The danger of a desperate CCP turning to a hot war to save face is an ever-rising threat. (If Three Gorges Dam fails, that could be the final straw.)

FDR deliberately suckered Japan into attacking the US (but apparently never guessed it would be on Pearl Harbor). It appears modern neo warmongers of all stripes would be delighted if China were tempted into yet another senseless war in the Pacific. And more lives lost on all sides.

While the size of US military and (ineptly named) "intelligence" budgets are vastly out of scale, the short-term cost in money is secondary to risk of long-term cost in blood. Surging the budget may make good sense when guns are all pointing in the wrong direction and political donors don't care as long as it pays well.

Defeating that outrageously wasteful spending is the first battle to be won. Disengaging from stupid, distracting, unwinnable conflicts is an imperative to achieve that goal.

The Judge , 8 hours ago

US. is the real threat to US interests.

DeptOfPsyOps-14527776 , 8 hours ago

An important part of this statue quo is propaganda and in particular neo-con propaganda.

Once it was clear that agitating against the Russian federation had failed, they started agitating against the PRC.

FDR administration wasn't that clever, they just had (((support))). They wanted Imperial Japan unable to strengthen itself against the United Kingdom as it was waging a war against the European Axis, did not realize that the Japanese fleet could reach as far as Hawaii and after Pearl Harbor, believed the West Coast could have been attacked as well.

Hovewer, they likely expected the Japanese to intercept their fleet on the way to the Phillipines after a war between Imperial Japan and the Commonwealth had started.

Salzburg1756 , 8 hours ago

"FDR deliberately suckered Japan into attacking the US (but apparently never guessed it would be on Pearl Harbor)." No, we knew the japs were going to attack Pearl Harbor. We had broken their code. That's why we sent our best battle ships away from Hawaii just before the attack. Most of the ships they sank were old and worthless; our good ships were out at sea.

TheLastMan , 4 hours ago

What constitutes "America's interests"?

the us military is the world community welcome wagon for global multi national Corp chamber of commerce

Do us citizens serve corporations or do corporations serve us citizens?

next ?, who owns / controls corporations?

Alice-the-dog , 8 hours ago

There is a reason why suicide is the leading cause of death among active duty military. They come to realize that what they are doing is perfect male bovine fecal matter. That they are guilty of participating in completely unwarranted death and destruction.

847328_3527 , 9 hours ago

Liberals and "progressives" are traditionally against wars. This new "woke" group of Demorats shows they are NOT liberals or progressives since they support the Establishment War Criminals like Obama and his side kick, demented Biden, and Bloodthirsty Clinton.

[Jul 25, 2020] Characteristics of fascism

Jul 25, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

There are sources all over the web giving 14 identifying points of fascism, including from Umberto Eco, who lived under Mussolini, but I leave finding that material as an exercise. Rump's a close fit. My take right now is more personal.

My father left Europe when Hitler came to power. Dad had wandered into one of his early rallies and heard him speak, and it scared him when he assumed power. I heard these stories growing up, and I've had a terrible sinking feeling for the last 4 years. Yeah, Rump is a tv era artifact (like Reagan was a movie era artifact), with no true power or talent except manipulating, but the occupant of that house is always a figurehead for the ruling class.

There are truly frightening people invested in his "movement", like the aforementioned Erik Prince. I've been saying for years that Rump has been grooming CBP and ICE as his personal force, loyal to him and not the nation, and we're seeing the fruition.

(added)

It's not so much that Rump is a fascist. He's a seed crystal for the American propensity for fascism. Americans have always had a soft spot for fascism. I am frightened. I remember the stories. up 5 users have voted. --

If I'm wrong, it's the first time I'm happy to be confused. -Don Van Vliet

[Jul 23, 2020] Iran's top security official: Harsher revenge awaits perpetrators of Gen. Soleimani's assassination

Jul 23, 2020 | www.presstv.com

News / Politics Iran's top security official: Harsher revenge awaits perpetrators of Gen. Soleimani's assassination Wednesday, 22 July 2020 4:29 PM [ Last Update: Wednesday, 22 July 2020 4:29 PM ]

Members of the Iraqi honor guard walk past a huge portrait of Iran's late top general Qassem Soleimani (L) and Iraqi commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, both killed in a US drone strike near Baghdad airport last month, during a memorial service held in Baghdad's high-security Green Zone on February 11, 2020. (Photo by AFP)

Iran's top security official says harsher revenge awaits the perpetrators of the attack that killed senior Iranian anti-terrorism commander Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani and his companions.

In a post on his Twitter page on Wednesday, Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani said that US President Donald Trump had admitted that the American, upon his direct order, committed the crime of assassinating General Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the second-in-command of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) counter-terrorism force, who were two prominent figures of the anti-terrorism campaign.

"The two Iranian and Iraqi nations are avengers of blood of these martyrs and will not rest until they punish the perpetrators," read part of the tweet.

"Harsher revenge is one the way," it concluded.

The two commanders and a number of their companions were assassinated in a US airstrike near Baghdad airport on January 3, as General Soleimani was on an official visit to the Iraqi capital.

Both commanders were extremely popular because of the key role they played in eliminating the US-sponsored Daesh terrorist group in the region, particularly in Iraq and Syria.

UN experts calls US drone attack on Gen. Soleimani 'unlawful' killing A senior UN human rights investigator says the United States' assassination of top Iranian commander Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad was an "unlawful" killing in violation of the international law.

In retaliation for the attack, the IRGC fired volleys of ballistic missiles a US base in Iraq on January 8. According to the US Defense Department, more than 100 American forces suffered "traumatic brain injuries" during the counterstrike. The IRGC, however, says Washington uses the term to mask the number of the Americans, who perished during the retaliation.

Iran has also issued an arrest warrant and asked Interpol for help in detaining Trump, who ordered the assassination, and several other US military and political leaders behind the strike.

Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said on Tuesday Iran will never forget Washington's assassination of General Soleimani and will definitely deliver a "counterblow" to the United States.

Leader: Iran to deal US 'counterblow' for Gen. Soleimani's assassination Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei meets with visiting Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi in Tehran.

"The Islamic Republic of Iran will never forget this issue and will definitely deal the counterblow to the Americans," Ayatollah Khamenei said in a meeting with visiting Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi in Tehran.

"They killed your guest at your own home and unequivocally admitted the atrocity. This is no small matter," Ayatollah Khamenei told the Iraqi premier.

A UN special rapporteur says has condemned the US assassination and said Washington has put the world at unprecedented peril with its murder of Iran's top anti-terror commander.

UN expert raps US for arbitrary drone attack that killed Gen. Soleimani A UN special rapporteur slams the US for refusing to take responsibility for the assassination of General Soleimani in violation of international law.

Agnes Callamard, UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, has also warned that it is high time the international community broke its silence on Washington's drone-powered unlawful killings.


Press TV's website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:

[Jul 23, 2020] Wartime Without End, War Powers Without Check -

Jul 23, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

kouroi 13 days ago

The Congress is serving the interests of the US Oligarchy, at home and abroad. The strategy is simple: keep allies/vassals in obeisance and non-competitive and destroy polities that do not subject themselves to a similar system (which ends up to become subservient to the US interests anyways, in the long run). Thus, all enemies are polities were Oligarchy doesn't run the roster, and are semi-socialist / socialist countries: Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, in the past Iraq.

Fully fledged democracies, that truly enact the will of the people, would not do something like this.

Carlton Meyer 13 days ago

For those too young to remember the horrible American war on Yugoslavia in 1999, or those who have forgot, or were misled with lies about Kosovo, here is a quick summary:

https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FUsRkqnFn8DA%3Ffeature%3Doembed&display_name=YouTube&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DUsRkqnFn8DA&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FUsRkqnFn8DA%2Fhqdefault.jpg&key=21d07d84db7f4d66a55297735025d6d1&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=youtube

ericsiverson Carlton Meyer 11 days ago

This is a very accurate and honest report what { NATO } the North American Terrorist Organization did to Yugoslavia . If you Americans wish to know what kind of global government you are promoting . You only have to find the actual transcripts of Milosevic's trail . Don't read or listen to any fake news of the trail . You must read the trail transcripts and judge for yourself The butcher of Balkans has kind of been exonerated after his death . The world court is something to be very afraid of not at all a instrument of justice .But the trail transcripts are about 5000 pages so you will have to work to find out the truth .

Ram2017 11 days ago

WW2 and it's depiction in various films and TV programs has had an unexpected effect on the military psyche. The US believes it won the war on it's own and the troops came home as heroes. This is the expectation of the US military even today, unable to accept that it can be defeated. "Thank you for your service" is a given whatever crimes had been committed abroad on the innocent who had done them no harm whatsoever. The ICC is opposed on the theory that US troops cannot commit torture or massacres.

Adriaan de Leeuw Ram2017 11 days ago

The Joke is that the US has not one a war since WWII, except maybe Granada. As for War Crimes, the Current President himself committed a War Crime, He gave a Pardon to a Convicted War Criminal, that is actually breach of the Geneva Conventions, which is US Treaty Law and as such equal to the Constitution itself in importance. Schedule 4 Article 146

The High Contracting Parties undertake to enact any legislation necessary to provide effective penal sanctions for persons committing, or ordering to be committed, any of the grave breaches of the present Convention defined in the following Article.

Each High Contracting Party shall be under the obligation to search for persons alleged to have committed, or to have ordered to be committed, such grave breaches, and shall bring such persons, regardless of their nationality, before its own courts. It may also, if it prefers, and in accordance with the provisions of its own legislation, hand such persons over for trial to another High Contracting Party concerned, provided such High Contracting Party has made out a prima facie case.

Each High Contracting Party shall take measures necessary for the suppression of all acts contrary to the provisions of the present Convention other than the grave breaches defined in the following Article.

In all circumstances, the accused persons shall benefit by safeguards of proper trial and defense, which shall not be less favorable than those provided by Article 105 and those following of the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War of August 12, 1949.

Article 147

Grave breaches to which the preceding Article relates shall be those involving any of the following acts, if committed against persons or property protected by the present Convention: willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person, compelling a protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile Power, or willfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed in the present Convention, taking of hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.

Article 148

No High Contracting Party shall be allowed to absolve itself or any other High Contracting Party of any liability incurred by itself or by another High Contracting Party in respect of breaches referred to in the preceding Article.

The President has by absolving the Navy Seal of the Liability, Absolved the United States of the War Crime also, Now I understand that we will hear arguments here of the Presidents ability to Pardon, but take this as a given, there is no way that During the Nuremberg Trials the Prosecution of those War Crimes would have accepted the argument that the Head of State of Germany (Hitler) had the blanket Authority to Pardon German War Criminals. as such and this is why this was placed in the Geneva Conventions the very act of Absolving a War Crime is itself a War Crime!

bootin buddin Ram2017 10 days ago

We could care less what the ICC is opposed to. We are not subject to the ICC or international law. We can enforce it if needed but do not have to abide by it.

rayray bootin buddin 10 days ago

The micrograins of ICC jurisdiction and validity require a sharper legal mind than mine to sift through. But the debate is revelatory of something else -

In general, the current domestic ICC debate reveals part of the true nature of the US (helped in no small part by the hamfisted and transparent vulgarity of President Trump): that we are in fact the rogue state that we accuse everyone else in the world of being.

If we are who we say we are we should be straight up supporting the ICC, helping to fund it and increase its reach and investigative power. Far better than any military intervention to deal with the truly bad actors in the world would be a legal intervention. The idea that vicious and violent despots should run scared when they travel or otherwise face arrest and extradition is exactly right.

But we're not. Why? The answer is obvious at this point - because we have powerful players in our midst that would face that arrest. And should face that arrest.

[Jul 23, 2020] This is a biggie: Egypt's parliament approves troop deployment to Libya

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... I suspect In'Sultin Erd O'Grand is a mole of the garden kind. He goes about digging one hole for himself after another. ..."
Jul 23, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

ET AL July 21, 2020 at 6:01 am

This is a biggie:

Al's Jizz Error: Egypt's parliament approves troop deployment to Libya
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/07/egypt-legislators-vote-deploying-troops-libya-200720141515828.html

Move comes as Libya gov't and Turkey demand an end of foreign intervention in support of commander Khalifa Haftar.
####

I suspect In'Sultin Erd O'Grand is a mole of the garden kind. He goes about digging one hole for himself after another. If he keeps this up, all the holes will merge in to one and he will disappear! It would give the West a chance to have someone running Turkey with a more reliably western perspective though I think it is clear that whatever comes next, Turkey will not allow itself to be treated as a western annex and pawn.

[Jul 20, 2020] The US military is defending US global hegemony, and is priced accordingly. What you think of US military spending depends on what you think of the US as a hegemon.

Jul 20, 2020 | crookedtimber.org

Ebenezer Scrooge 07.19.20 at 1:13 pm

US military spending is certainly much higher than it needs to be for US defense needs. But the US military is not primarily defending the US. It is defending Asia from China, NATO from Russia, and a number of countries from Iran, not to speak of Norkland.

IOW, the US military is defending US global hegemony, and is priced accordingly. What you think of US military spending depends on what you think of the US as a hegemon.


Alan White 07.19.20 at 2:15 pm ( 21 )

Thanks John that's very helpful -- I thought those two figures would be much closer together. Reading CT is always instructive in one way or another.

James Wimberley 07.19.20 at 5:02 pm ( 22 )

Long comment on the cross-post, on the cost of the energy transition part of the GND:
https://johnquiggin.com/2020/07/18/a-trillion-here-a-trillion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money-creation/#comment-226012

Tom 07.20.20 at 1:37 pm ( 23 )

As a share of GDP, military spending today is half of what it was in 1986. Data here:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?locations=US

I am not a fan of military spending – following an excellent post by John about Eisenhower's famous speech (more tanks or more hospitals), I often use it as an example opportunity cost when teaching. One can certainly claim that the budget should be lower but, as a share of overall economic resources, the budget has been cut substantially in the last 30 years.

[Jul 19, 2020] A trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon you're talking real money

Jul 19, 2020 | crookedtimber.org

Alan White 07.19.20 at 1:21 am

John, what say you about US/global military spending, which if cut and reallocated in the low double digits could transform society? Do you think it's just politically untouchable? If the US cut its military budget by say 25% it would still be formidable, especially given its nuclear deterrent. For the life of me I can never understand why military budgets are sacrosanct. Is it just WW2 and Cold War hangover? Couldn't the obvious effects of climate change and the fragility of the economy subject to natural threats like the pandemic change attitudes about overfunding the military (like the debacle of the F-35 program)?

John Quiggin 07.19.20 at 3:50 am ( 15 )

Alan White @13 Military spending is about 3.4 per cent of US GDP, compared to 2 per cent or less most places. So that's a significant and unproductive use of resources that could be redirected to better effect. But the income of the top 1 per cent is around 20 per cent of total income. If that was cut in half, there would be little or no reduction in the productive services supplied by this group. If you want big change, that's where you need to look.

eg 07.19.20 at 4:08 am ( 16 )

@Alan White #13

I think some of the reluctance to cut military spending in the US is the extent to which it acts as a politically unassailable source of fiscal stimulus and "welfare" in a country where such things are otherwise anathema. Well, that and all of the grift it represents for the donor class.

likbez 07.19.20 at 10:18 am ( 17 )

@John Quiggin 07.19.20 at 3:50 am *15)

Alan White @13 Military spending is about 3.4 per cent of US GDP, compared to 2 per cent or less most places.

GDP is a fake metric in general (due to the size of FIRE sector in the US economy) and especially when we are discussing military spending.

Military spending is 53% of discretionary spending which put the USA in the category of the most militarized countries. https://www.nationalpriorities.org/analysis/2020/militarized-budget-2020/

[Jul 19, 2020] We need to ban corporations from doing anything in the political arena

Jul 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Richard Steven Hack , Jul 19 2020 1:17 utc | 78

Posted by: time2wakeupnow | Jul 18 2020 18:59 utc | 13 But there are also very real First Amendment interests implicated by laws which bar entities from spending money to express political viewpoints."

With regard to Greenwald's opinion, mine is relatively simple: ban corporations from doing *anything* in the political arena. Corporations are *not* people, regardless of the legal myth that they are. Officers of corporations have no standing other than their personal standing, and they should be barred from contributing to campaigns, or lobbying for legislation or anything else outside of conducting the business they are *licensed by the state* to do.

This does not apply to incorporated non-profit organizations which are organized to do precisely what corporations should be banned from doing: advocate and attempt to influence specific legislation or policies or candidates for office. For profit corporations should be banned from doing anything to influence non-profit organizations, by the way, otherwise corporations will do an end-run around the ban on political action by funding fake "non-profit" organizations.

With regard to the large social media, there should be a law passed which 1) prevents them from being sued regardless of anything their subscribers say on their platforms, and 2) prevents them from censoring anything their subscribers say on their platforms. This was true on the street and should be true on the Internet. Freedom of speech is a cornerstone of the Constitution and should be protected on the Internet.

That does not apply here in MOA because MOA is a small operation owned and operated by one person. He has the right to ban or censor anything he likes. But if he was the size of Facebook or Twitter, he would have serious social influence. In that case, it would be justified to both hold him blameless for the trolls and also prevent him from censoring trolls.

Dealing with offensive people on the large platforms (and even here) should be done by providing the users adequate personal controls in their interface which enable the users to remove content from their view that they don't like, while the content remains in view for anyone who approves of it or doesn't care. Some forums have been doing this for years, such as Slashdot.

These solutions are incredibly simple. The reason they are not implemented is because different factions see benefit in not implementing them.

Naturally, as an anarchist, the solutions I suggest are predicated on the idiocy of having states and corporations in the first place. Otherwise, all these "issues" wouldn't even exist. This is what you get when you have a religious belief in the state and society.

[Jul 18, 2020] SCOTT RITTER- Powell Iraq -- Regime Change, Not Disarmament- The Fundamental Lie Consortiumnews

Notable quotes:
"... Special to Consortium News ..."
"... Powell was part of the policy team that crafted the post-Gulf War response to the fact that Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein, survived a conflict he was not meant to. After being labeled the Middle East equivalent of Adolf Hitler whose crimes required Nuremburg-like retribution in a speech delivered by President Bush in October 1990, the Iraqi President's post-conflict hold on power had become a political problem for Bush 41. ..."
"... Powell was aware of the CIA's post-war assessment on the vulnerability of Saddam's rule to continued economic sanctions, and helped craft the policy that led to the passage of Security Council resolution 687 in April 1991. That linked Iraq's obligation to be disarmed of its WMD prior to any lifting of sanctions and the reality that it was U.S. policy not to lift these sanctions, regardless of Iraq's disarmament status, until which time Saddam was removed from power. ..."
"... Regime change, not disarmament, was always the driving factor behind U.S. policy towards Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Powell knew this because he helped craft the original policy. ..."
"... The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of ..."
"... Consortium News. ..."
"... 25th Anniversary ..."
Jul 18, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

SCOTT RITTER: Powell & Iraq -- Regime Change, Not Disarmament: The Fundamental Lie July 18, 2020 Save

Regime change, not disarmament, was always the driving factor behind U.S. policy towards Saddam Hussein. Powell knew this because he helped craft the original policy.

By Scott Ritter
Special to Consortium News

T he New York Times Magazine has published a puff piece soft-peddling former Secretary of State Colin Powell's role in selling a war on Iraq to the UN Security Council using what turned out to be bad intelligence. "Colin Powell Still Wants Answers" is the title of the article, written by Robert Draper. "The analysts who provided the intelligence," a sub-header to the article declares, "now say it was doubted inside the CIA at the time."

Draper's article is an extract from a book, To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq , scheduled for publication later this month. In the interest of full disclosure, I was approached by Draper in 2018 about his interest in writing this book, and I agreed to be interviewed as part of his research. I have not yet read the book, but can note that, based upon the tone and content of his New York Times Magazine article, my words apparently carried little weight.

Regime Change, Not WMD

I spent some time articulating to Draper my contention that the issue with Saddam Hussein's Iraq was never about weapons of mass destruction (WMD), but rather regime change, and that everything had to be viewed in the light of this reality -- including Powell's Feb. 5, 2003 presentation before the UN Security Council. Based upon the content of his article, I might as well have been talking to a brick wall.

Powell's 2003 presentation before the council did not take place in a policy vacuum. In many ways, the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq was a continuation of the 1991 Gulf War, which Powell helped orchestrate. Its fumbled aftermath was again, something that transpired on Powell's watch as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the administration of George H. W. Bush.

Powell at UN Security Council. (UN Photo)

Powell was part of the policy team that crafted the post-Gulf War response to the fact that Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein, survived a conflict he was not meant to. After being labeled the Middle East equivalent of Adolf Hitler whose crimes required Nuremburg-like retribution in a speech delivered by President Bush in October 1990, the Iraqi President's post-conflict hold on power had become a political problem for Bush 41.

Powell was aware of the CIA's post-war assessment on the vulnerability of Saddam's rule to continued economic sanctions, and helped craft the policy that led to the passage of Security Council resolution 687 in April 1991. That linked Iraq's obligation to be disarmed of its WMD prior to any lifting of sanctions and the reality that it was U.S. policy not to lift these sanctions, regardless of Iraq's disarmament status, until which time Saddam was removed from power.

Regime change, not disarmament, was always the driving factor behind U.S. policy towards Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Powell knew this because he helped craft the original policy.

I bore witness to the reality of this policy as a weapons inspector working for the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), created under the mandate of resolution 687 to oversee the disarming of Iraq's WMD. Brought in to create an intelligence capability for the inspection team, my remit soon expanded to operations and, more specifically, how Iraq was hiding retained weapons and capability from the inspectors.

SCUDS

UN weapons inspectors in central Iraq, June 1, 1991. (UN Photo)

One of my first tasks was addressing discrepancies in Iraq's accounting of its modified SCUD missile arsenal; in December 1991 I wrote an assessment that Iraq was likely retaining approximately 100 missiles. By March 1992 Iraq, under pressure, admitted it had retained a force of 89 missiles (that number later grew to 97).

After extensive investigations, I was able to corroborate the Iraqi declarations, and in November 1992 issued an assessment that UNSCOM could account for the totality of Iraq's SCUD missile force. This, of course, was an unacceptable conclusion, given that a compliant Iraq meant sanctions would need to be lifted and Saddam would survive.

The U.S. intelligence community rejected my findings without providing any fact-based evidence to refute it, and the CIA later briefed the Senate that it assessed Iraq to be retaining a force of some 200 covert SCUD missiles. This all took place under Powell's watch as chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

I challenged the CIA's assessment, and organized the largest, most complex inspection in UNSCOM's history to investigate the intelligence behind the 200-missile assessment. In the end, the intelligence was shown to be wrong, and in November 1993 I briefed the CIA Director's senior staff on UNSCOM's conclusion that all SCUD missiles were accounted for.

Moving the Goalposts

The CIA's response was to assert that Iraq had a force of 12-20 covert SCUD missiles, and that this number would never change, regardless of what UNSCOM did. This same assessment was in play at the time of Powell's Security Council presentation, a blatant lie born of the willful manufacture of lies by an entity -- the CIA -- whose task was regime change, not disarmament.

Powell knew all of this, and yet he still delivered his speech to the UN Security Council.

In October 2002, in a briefing designed to undermine the credibility of UN inspectors preparing to return to Iraq, the Defense Intelligence Agency trotted out Dr. John Yurechko, the defense intelligence officer for information operations and denial and deception, to provide a briefing detailing U.S. claims that Iraq was engaged in a systematic process of concealment regarding its WMD programs.

John Yurechko, of the Defense Intelligence Agency, briefs reporters at the Pentagon on Oct. 8, 2002 (U.S. Defense Dept.)

According to Yurechko, the briefing was compiled from several sources, including "inspector memoirs" and Iraqi defectors. The briefing was farcical, a deliberate effort to propagate misinformation by the administration of Bush 43. I know -- starting in 1994, I led a concerted UNSCOM effort involving the intelligence services of eight nations to get to the bottom of Iraq's so-called "concealment mechanism."

Using innovative imagery intelligence techniques, defector debriefs, agent networks and communications intercepts, combined with extremely aggressive on-site inspections, I was able, by March 1998, to conclude that Iraqi concealment efforts were largely centered on protecting Saddam Hussein from assassination, and had nothing to do with hiding WMD. This, too, was an inconvenient finding, and led to the U.S. dismantling the apparatus of investigation I had so carefully assembled over the course of four years.

It was never about the WMD -- Powell knew this. It was always about regime change.

Using UN as Cover for Coup Attempt

In 1991, Powell signed off on the incorporation of elite U.S. military commandos into the CIA's Special Activities Staff for the purpose of using UNSCOM as a front to collect intelligence that could facilitate the removal of Saddam Hussein. I worked with this special cell from 1991 until 1996, on the mistaken opinion that the unique intelligence, logistics and communications capability they provided were useful to planning and executing the complex inspections I was helping lead in Iraq.

This program resulted in the failed coup attempt in June 1996 that used UNSCOM as its operational cover -- the coup failed, the Special Activities Staff ceased all cooperation with UNSCOM, and we inspectors were left holding the bag. The Iraqis had every right to be concerned that UNSCOM inspections were being used to target their president because, the truth be told, they were.

Nowhere in Powell's presentation to the Security Council, or in any of his efforts to recast that presentation as a good intention led astray by bad intelligence, does the reality of regime change factor in. Regime change was the only policy objective of three successive U.S. presidential administrations -- Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43.

Powell was a key player in two of these. He knew. He knew about the existence of the CIA's Iraq Operations Group. He knew of the successive string of covert "findings" issued by U.S. presidents authorizing the CIA to remove Saddam Hussein from power using lethal force. He knew that the die had been cast for war long before Bush 43 decided to engage the United Nations in the fall of 2002.

Powell Knew

Powell knew all of this, and yet he still allowed himself to be used as a front to sell this conflict to the international community, and by extension the American people, using intelligence that was demonstrably false. If, simply by drawing on my experience as an UNSCOM inspector, I knew every word he uttered before the Security Council was a lie the moment he spoke, Powell should have as well, because every aspect of my work as an UNSCOM inspector was known to, and documented by, the CIA.

It is not that I was unknown to Powell in the context of the WMD narrative. Indeed, my name came up during an interview Powell gave to Fox News on Sept. 8, 2002, when he was asked to comment on a quote from my speech to the Iraqi Parliament earlier that month in which I stated:

"The rhetoric of fear that is disseminated by my government and others has not to date been backed up by hard facts that substantiate any allegations that Iraq is today in possession of weapons of mass destruction or has links to terror groups responsible for attacking the United States. Void of such facts, all we have is speculation."

Powell responded by declaring,

"We have facts, not speculation. Scott is certainly entitled to his opinion but I'm afraid that I would not place the security of my nation and the security of our friends in the region on that kind of an assertion by somebody who's not in the intelligence chain any longer If Scott is right, then why are they keeping the inspectors out? If Scott is right, why don't they say, 'Anytime, any place, anywhere, bring 'em in, everybody come in -- we are clean?' The reason is they are not clean. And we have to find out what they have and what we're going to do about it. And that's why it's been the policy of this government to insist that Iraq be disarmed in accordance with the terms of the relevant UN resolutions."

UN inspectors in Iraq. (UN Photo)

Of course, in November 2002, Iraq did just what Powell said they would never do -- they let the UN inspectors return without preconditions. The inspectors quickly exposed the fact that the "high quality" U.S. intelligence they had been tasked with investigating was pure bunk. Left to their own devices, the new round of UN weapons inspections would soon be able to give Iraq a clean bill of health, paving the way for the lifting of sanctions and the continued survival of Saddam Hussein.

Powell knew this was not an option. And thus he allowed himself to be used as a vehicle for disseminating more lies -- lies that would take the U.S. to war, cost thousands of U.S. service members their lives, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, all in the name of regime change.

Back to Robert Draper. I spent a considerable amount of time impressing upon him the reality of regime change as a policy, and the fact that the WMD disarmament issue existed for the sole purpose of facilitating regime change. Apparently, my words had little impact, as all Draper has done in his article is continue the false narrative that America went to war on the weight of false and misleading intelligence.

Draper is wrong -- America went to war because it was our policy as a nation, sustained over three successive presidential administrations, to remove Saddam Hussein from power. By 2002 the WMD narrative that had been used to support and sustain this regime change policy was weakening.

Powell's speech was a last-gasp effort to use the story of Iraqi WMD for the purpose it was always intended -- to facilitate the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. In this light, Colin Powell's speech was one of the greatest successes in CIA history. That is not the story, however, Draper chose to tell, and the world is worse off for that failed opportunity.

Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

Please Contribute to Consortium
News on its 25th Anniversary


[Jul 16, 2020] Should the Trump Presidential Library be built in Israel ?: The rumor is that Trump Secretly Authorized CIA To Run Cyberwar Ops against Iran and Russia

Or did he? Yet another evil rumor designed to poison relations with Russia. This time from Yahoo
Still Trump has not only appointed the aggressive Michael D'Andrea, the 'Prince of Darkness', to head the CIA's Iran Mission Center but he gave the CIA wide ranging new powers to run cyber attacks against the country:
Notable quotes:
"... When has the CIA ever had oversight? ..."
"... Pretty sure oversight jumped out the 84th floor window very early on. Voluntarily of course. ..."
Jul 16, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

andrewp111 , 29 minutes ago

I'm sure Trump thinks - Let the CIA play in their cyber sandbox. The Norks dissed Trump and the others deserve it, so, so what? It keeps the spooks happy and occupied, and out of Trump's hair.

play_arrow 1
m0ckingbird , 6 minutes ago

are you sure trump thinks? like AT ALL? you give your grown man-child way too much credit

ExposeThem511 , 1 hour ago

When has the CIA ever had oversight?

metanoic , 54 minutes ago

Pretty sure oversight jumped out the 84th floor window very early on. Voluntarily of course.

[Jul 14, 2020] There is a recent book which analyses how the US policy of preventive mass murder and torture in Indonesia has inspired policies, structures and knowhow in many of US client states

Jul 14, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

JC , Jul 12 2020 20:08 utc | 100

Posted by: uncle tungsten | Jul 12 2020 1:38 utc | 48 & 64
Posted by: Lucci | Jul 12 2020 15:59 utc | 87

To clear the air, I recalled the "Non-Aligned Movement a forum of developing states not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc or nations." It consist of - Nehru India, Tito Yugoslavia, Bung Karno, Bapa Sukarno Indonesia, Zhou Enlai China, Habib Bourguiba Tunisian, Norodom Sihanouk Cambodian, U Nu Burma, Kwame Nkrumah, Gamal Abdel Nasser Egypt, Fidel Castro Cuba, at the Bandung conference in 1955, the Non-Aligned Movement was born. Later many nationalism leaders were disposed. How about Sukarno, did he "slaughter" the Chinese? Nope that's from what I was told from BBC and it remains in my mind until uncle tungstan and Lucci points out my mistakes, it was Suharto with CIA and Brit Foreign Office that brought down Sukarno and Suharto was disposed his wife was known as Ten Percent.

How we destroyed Sukarno

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/how-we-destroyed-sukarno-1188448.html

I was growing up and aligned with Americans exceptionlism. It was after ww2 and nationalism on the rise (almost) everywhere changed of government. In school each morning assembled to raised the union jack and sing god save the freaking queen. That's when I was indoctrinated from BBC the evils of communism and socialism. Western imperialist was the way to go man. Much of my lunch hours in the library mainly reading, one book, my librarian recommended The Jungle is Neutral by Spencer F, Chapman . The book still available and probably my view has changed am no longer accepting the stupid Brit and Yank.


Tuyzentfloot , Jul 12 2020 21:07 utc | 103

@ JC there is a recent book which analyses how the US policy of preventive mass murder and torture in Indonesia has inspired policies, structures and knowhow in many of US client states : https://vincentbevins.com/book/

uncle tungsten , Jul 12 2020 21:19 utc | 104
JC #100

Thank you for clearing the air on Sukarno. The Indonesian coup that destroyed the democratic socialis government he led was a tragic loss to the people of Indonesia. The coup leader Suharto fully backed by the CIA murdered many hundreds of thousands of civilians and their elected officials and educators and medical staff. It was a ruthless murderous purge. The Dulles brothers at the top.

Suharto then ruled for decades and Indonesia became the evil corruption ridden prison it is today. This sad country is our planets exemplar failed state ruled by criminal oligarchs and their owned courts and religion.

Indonesian people are great in their spirit and humility, they deserve better.

Jen , Jul 12 2020 23:50 utc | 114

JC and others who have been conversing with him on the issue of the Indonesian military's persecution and slaughter of Chinese Indonesians and others perceived to be Communist or sympathetic to Communism or socialism might be interested in watching Joshua Oppenheimer's "The Act of Killing" to see how small-time thugs and young people (especially those in the Pancasila Youth movement) alike were caught up in the anti-Communist brainwashing frenzy in Indonesia during the 1960s and participated in the mass persecution and slaughter themselves.

Oppenheimer tracked down some of these former killers in North Sumatra and got them to re-enact their crimes in whatever from they desired. For various reasons, some of them psychological, they were quite enthusiastic about this idea. Significantly they chose to re-enact their crimes as a Hollywood Western / Godfather-style pastiche film, even getting their relatives and friends to play extras.

The mass murderers interviewed did well for themselves with some of them even becoming politicians and rising to the level of Cabinet Minister in the Indonesian government. The film also shows something of how deeply corruption is embedded in everyday life with one prospective political candidate going around bribing villagers and demanding money from small-time ethnic Chinese shopkeepers in his electorate and threatening them with violence if they do not cough up.

The major issue I have with the film is that by focusing on these mass murderers in North Sumatra, it misses the overall national and international political and social context that still supports and applauds what these killers did. As long as this continues, the likelihood that similar persecutions and genocidal purges of outsider groups and individuals, be they Chinese, Christian, Shi'a and other heterodox Muslim, academics, trade unionists, separatists in Maluku, West Papua or other parts of Indoneisa, and all these purges supported by the West in some way, will occur in the future is strong.

Antonym , Jul 13 2020 1:44 utc | 132

@ Jen 114
"As long as this continues, the likelihood that similar persecutions and genocidal purges of outsider groups and individuals, be they Chinese, Christian, Shi'a and other heterodox Muslim, academics, trade unionists, separatists in Maluku, West Papua or other parts of Indoneisa, and all these purges supported by the West in some way, will occur in the future is strong."

Yeah, "we" Anglos" are the only bad guys on this planet - not.
The CIA & co are not yet into slaughtering of Christians. Extremist Indonesian Sunni Muslims were guilty in the above atrocities, continuing as harassments till today. Hard to swallow: bad brown people do exist!

[Jul 14, 2020] Though government infiltrators undoubtedly helped to fragment Occupy, most protesters gleefully went along with their own gelding, because, to them, it was never about rallying the 99% towards common goals, as they vaguely claimed, but airing minority grievances.

The question is : what is the role of FBI in organizing and driving the current protests, especially the action of antifa?
Notable quotes:
"... It would be fitting justice for AntiFa to go the way the Red Guards ..."
"... Not quite nine years later, almost no one is talking about banksters, incredibly, although the country has been plunged into a much worse economic hell Broke and enraged, mobs swarm American streets, but instead of targeting those who are imploding their society, they pull down statues, break windows, deface walls, loot stores and attack cops or each other. ..."
"... Pelosi said even if DC burns down to the ground, the US will be 100% for Israel. Why not include Wall Street, the money bag of Jewish Power? ..."
"... In a way, what we are seeing is the Japanization of White America. This is why the US should not have dropped the nukes and forced unconditional surrender. They should have allowed Japan to surrender with honor. Make Japan give up its empire and military ambitions but let the Japanese keep their culture and sacred myths. But the US forced unconditional surrender, turned the Emperor into Tokyo Shoeshine boy, occupied Japan(and still has bases there), used Japanese women as whores & mistresses, and turned Japanese men into castrated cuck-wussies. Sound familiar? ..."
Jul 14, 2020 | www.unz.com

Though government infiltrators undoubtedly helped to fragment Occupy, most protesters gleefully went along with their own gelding, because, to them, it was never about rallying the 99% towards common goals, as they vaguely claimed, but airing minority grievances. Most importantly, they could look cool doing it.

With visual evidence uploaded onto FaceBook, Tumblr and Instagram, etc., soy boys from strip malled subdivisions could accrue street cred.

Since "Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing " became Occupy's rallying cry, it achieved literally nothing, predictably. A month after all tents were cleared from Zuccotti Park, Time Magazine anointed "The Protester" as Person Of The Year, so for being symbolically homeless for two months, the sans cazzo got a participation lollipop from the bossman.

Since then, unscathed and smirking Wall Street has only amped up its state-of-the-art shell games, punctuated by bailouts. What's left of the country's wealth keeps flowing to the top.

Although Occupy Wall Street exposed widespread discontent, it was deftly tamed by the state, without addressing any of the issues raised. Worsened economic malaise is papered over with fake news and statistics. Unable to afford even an efficiency, the young and not so young resignedly or bitterly move back home. I'm sure you know a few.

Beneath each basement, there's another, even darker and danker, Americans kept discovering, so they just had to suck it up and simmer on, when not overdosing on opioids. It's the new normal.

Occupy Wall Street protesters were mostly under-35-year-old whites, with at least some college education. Now, the same demographic is back on the streets, but instead of chanting for economic justice and representing, at least in theory, the 99%, they're fighting Fascism and racism. With their inclusive definitions of such sins, however, they're warring against most of the country.

... ... ...

On August 14th, 2018, CNN reeducated us, "There is no national antifa group. It is mostly made up of people who are far left of center, who make it their mission to battle Fascists, racists and alt right extremists." It's a grassroot, homegrown resistance to hate, that's all. "Behind the masks are people from all walks of life, artist, mom, ordinary American, as well as anarchist." Four most gentle faces were shown.

On June 16th, 2020, CNN reemphasized that antifa was a belief system that unified all anti-Fascists, whatever their color, age or background, so how could you be against it, unless you're a Fascist?! A burly, genial black man explained, "It basically means that you are against Fascism. If you are against Fascism, then you are antifa."

In a BLACK LIVES MATTER muscle-T, a white wuss added, "Antifa is not a group. It's not like everybody sits in, like, some basement, talking about how to overthrow the Fascist regime. I walked around picking up trash yesterday, behind the protesters. That's what antifa looks like."

Burly black guy, "White people have to be involved in fighting racism, in fighting white supremacy [ ] But if you are a white ally, remember that you still have to follow the lead of people of color."

The New York Times and Washington Post have also written sympathetically about antifa. When the corporate media give you a positive spin, it must mean you're serving the establishment. Mussolini had his Blackshirts, Hitler his Brownshirts and Mao his Red Guards. America's rulers have antifa.

Far from threatening the 1%, antifa sows dissension among the 99%. Ignoring Wall Street, antifa trashes one Main Street after another.

Zealously branding its enemies as racist or Fascist, antifa generates more racism and Fascism.

Slammed by the economic crisis of 2008, Americans started to look more closely at Wall Street, Goldman Sachs and the Federal Reserve , etc., and they were enlightened by people like Ron Paul and Matt Taibbi.

In Rolling Stone, Taibbi wrote, "The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

Banksters were scrutinized with increasing intensity. It was in this climate that Occupy Wall Street was born.

Not quite nine years later, almost no one is talking about banksters, incredibly, although the country has been plunged into a much worse economic hell, with millions suddenly laid off, and millions of mom and pops permanently ruined. Thanks to another monster bailout, only Wall Street is doing well.

Broke and enraged, mobs swarm American streets, but instead of targeting those who are imploding their society, they pull down statues, break windows, deface walls, loot stores and attack cops or each other.

When your tyrants can't even be identified, much less found, no coup, uprising or revolution is possible, and it's pointless to assassinate an American president, since he is but a puppet, so who should be shot?

The month I was born, two presidents were killed. Though Ngo Dinh Diem has often been caricatured as an American puppet, he obviously broke his strings, or he wouldn't have been shot. Kennedy, too, went off script. His death was a warning. It works.

American elections are cathartic farces. Drawn out and elaborately staged, they're designed to give false hopes and stoke emotions. With the national mood already so volatile and foul, however, this year's balloting promises to be a horror show. Unable to aim at their oppressors, Americans will be reduced to shooting each other.


TG , says: July 11, 2020 at 5:53 pm GMT

"Far from threatening the 1%, antifa sows dissension among the 99%. Ignoring Wall Street, antifa trashes one Main Street after another."

Kudos. Well said!!!

"Who should be shot?" I answer the question in the purely hypothetical, I am not in any way suggesting this line of response. But the answer is obvious.

When Tsar Nicholas and his family were murdered by the communists, it put the fear of God (or fear of something) in the hearts of the western plutocrats and we got the New Deal and more than a half century of the working class getting at least sort of a reasonable cut of the proceeds.

"Who shall we shoot?" If the Jeff Bezoses and Zuckerbergs and Soroses etc. of the world take a personal hit – if they begin to think that even they, in their well-guarded bubbles, are not safe – only then will we get any sort of consideration from the top. It is personal fear, not morality, that will cause the elites to again begin to value stability and order over rapacious looting.

No I am not in any way suggesting violence. Not me, no how. But it remains true that only the threat of personal violence directed at the elites, will cause them to reconsider their current socially destructive path.

Carlton Meyer , says: Website July 11, 2020 at 7:49 pm GMT

Though Ngo Dinh Diem has often been caricatured as an American puppet, he obviously broke his strings, or he wouldn't have been shot.

The CIA recruited Diem to be the puppet ruler of a nation they had created. He was living in New Jersey and then became head of South Vietnam without an election. He had attended the same elite school in Hue as Ho Chi Mihn and meant well. When he saw that fighting was increasing he wanted to cut a deal with Ho Chi Mihn, who had won the 1954 elections was the legitimate ruler of all Vietnam after the temporary cease fire line that divided Vietnam ended in 1956. The DMZ was an illusion created by the CIA and Pentagon.

This is why Diem was killed by a CIA coup, and was followed by other puppet leaders. The CIA's attempt to create a new nation that became known as South Vietnam failed by 1964, which is why American troops arrived.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/0B9BM8OTSB0?feature=oembed

The Alarmist , says: July 11, 2020 at 7:49 pm GMT

Mussolini had his Blackshirts, Hitler his Brownshirts and Mao his Red Guards. America's rulers have antifa.

The Black Shirts were able to gracefully fade away for the most part, but the other two groups had a rather difficult go once they had served their purpose. It would be fitting justice for AntiFa to go the way the Red Guards once President Abrams is safely ensconced: After all, you can't feed a country with hooligan student revolutionaries roving the streets rather than working the farms.

Si1ver1ock , says: July 11, 2020 at 11:31 pm GMT

The month I was born, two presidents were killed. Though Ngo Dinh Diem has often been caricatured as an American puppet, he obviously broke his strings, or he wouldn't have been shot. Kennedy, too, went off script. His death was a warning. It works.

Liz Chaney is thwarting Trump's troop draw-down in Afghanistan with help from Dems as well as Republicans.

House Democrats, Working With Liz Cheney, Restrict Trump's Planned Withdrawal of Troops From Afghanistan and Germany

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/02/house-democrats-working-with-liz-cheney-restrict-trumps-planned-withdrawal-of-troops-from-afghanistan-and-germany/

Trump is thinking about doing something stupid in Venezuela.

He is already antagonizing China.

Priss Factor , says: Website July 12, 2020 at 12:01 am GMT

Not quite nine years later, almost no one is talking about banksters, incredibly, although the country has been plunged into a much worse economic hell Broke and enraged, mobs swarm American streets, but instead of targeting those who are imploding their society, they pull down statues, break windows, deface walls, loot stores and attack cops or each other.

Pelosi said even if DC burns down to the ground, the US will be 100% for Israel. Why not include Wall Street, the money bag of Jewish Power?

In a way, what we are seeing is the Japanization of White America. This is why the US should not have dropped the nukes and forced unconditional surrender. They should have allowed Japan to surrender with honor. Make Japan give up its empire and military ambitions but let the Japanese keep their culture and sacred myths. But the US forced unconditional surrender, turned the Emperor into Tokyo Shoeshine boy, occupied Japan(and still has bases there), used Japanese women as whores & mistresses, and turned Japanese men into castrated cuck-wussies. Sound familiar?

... ... ...

animalogic , says: July 12, 2020 at 8:18 am GMT

Great article.
"Their movement fizzled out, however, because it degenerated into an endless display of narcissistic posturing, with everyone making self-important speeches about his or her pet cause, to an audience of fifty, tops, which is not how a revolution is ever made."
"Far from threatening the 1%, antifa sows dissension among the 99%. Ignoring Wall Street, antifa trashes one Main Street after another."
Is it ANY wonder why Elites love the post-modern, the PC, & antifa so much. Talk about the "magic pudding" & the gift that just keeps on giving .

Franz , says: July 12, 2020 at 9:31 am GMT

Broke and enraged, mobs swarm American streets, but instead of targeting those who are imploding their society, they pull down statues, break windows, deface walls, loot stores and attack cops or each other .

Hey! What the 19th century robber baron said has finally come true:

"I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." -- Jay Gould

They are being paid: BLM and Antifa people are being bankrolled. Just tote up the corporate donations the BLM in the past week and flip. More money than most nations have in the treasury. As to Antifa, Soros funded them for years. All to get rid of white people.

If it weren't happening, who'd believe it?

theMann , says: July 12, 2020 at 12:44 pm GMT
@Brian Reilly

You left out the Media Jackals. They are the willing and ever ready mouthpieces for the Satanic Cult the Financial Elites would turn America into. In fact, the Media liars have as much culpability as any group in the country for our current disaster.

Polemos , says: July 12, 2020 at 3:39 pm GMT

I think one reason why we're no longer talking about a 1% is that enough of us started to ask the question: what race/nationality are the 1%?

Parbes , says: July 12, 2020 at 4:23 pm GMT

Who should be shot? Start with the neocons (particularly the Jewish ones). They are the head of the snake in the West – especially the U.S. – today. Most evils are downstream from their actions/policies, directly or indirectly.

ruralguy , says: July 12, 2020 at 4:45 pm GMT

Who should be shot? It's hard imaging Americans staging a revolution. The DOD says 75% of young Americans don't quality to serve in the military, because they are too fat or too dumb. Our protesters protest because they get to appear virtuous -- they need some kind of participation award.

Jmaie , says: July 12, 2020 at 4:54 pm GMT

Jeff Stryker , says: July 12, 2020 at 5:00 pm GMT

...Upthread someone mentioned Bezos as being in the 1%. While he is certainly uber wealthy, I've always thought of him in a different way. In my mind the 1% are the wall street guys who financialize everything, and if they all went away tomorrow our (main street) economy would greatly improve. If Amazon goes away, I'd have to start buying all my crap in person. Ugh

The same fools assume the 1 percent will hang around when things become very adverse in the US. Nope. They'll do what wealthy South Africans did and the US lumpens will do what Boers did.

Nobody cares if the poor in the gutters of Wall Street go on hunger strike The one percent does not care if the poor go hungry anyhow.

Average middle class Americans are naive as to how callous and unconcerned the one percent is. The blacks and Hispanics at the bottom of society are aware, of course. That is why laws and customs mean nothing, nor bourgeois values. But it is the middle class who is actually naive enough to believe the one percent gives a fat rat's ass about them, about America, about their feelings.

I'm surprised this is not obvious to more people.

Rev. Spooner , says: July 12, 2020 at 5:07 pm GMT

Both Antifa and the Patriots have a huge red-blue target painted on their backs. Unless they can identify their overlords clearly, they will fight each other.
Hey Americans, who is it that you cannot criticize?

gaston julia , says: July 12, 2020 at 7:26 pm GMT
@ruralguy

https://www.wired.com/2009/11/75-of-potential-recruits-too-fat-too-sickly-too-dumb-to-serve/

[Jul 13, 2020] George Washington Tried To Warn Americans About Foreign Policy Today by Doug Bandow

Highly recommended!
This is all about maintaining the US-centered global neoliberal empire. After empires is created the the USA became the salve of imperial interests and in a way stopped existing as an independent country. Everything is thrown on the altar of "full spectrum Dominance". The result is as close to a real political and economic disaster as we can get. Like USSR leadership the US elite realized now that neoliberalism is not sustainable, but can't do anything as all bets were made for the final victory of neoliberalism all over the world, much like Soviets hoped for the victory of communism. That did not happened and although the USA now is in much better position then the USSR in 60th (but with the similar level of deterioration of cognitive abilities of the politicians as the USSR). In this sense COVID-19 was a powerful catalyst of the crush of the US-centered neoliberal empire
Notable quotes:
"... On the other side are the targets of "inveterate antipathies." This also characterizes US Middle East policy. So hated are Iran and Syria that Washington, DC is making every effort to destroy their economies, ruin their people's livelihoods, wreck their hospitals, and starve their population. The respective governments are bad, to be sure, but do not threaten the US Yet, as the nation's first president explained to Americans, "Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable, when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur. Hence, frequent collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests. The nation, prompted by ill-will and resentment, sometimes impels to war the government, contrary to the best calculations of policy." ..."
"... Consider how close the US has come to foolish, unnecessary wars against both nations. There were manifold demands that the US enter the Syrian civil war, in which Americans have no stake. Short of combat the Obama administration indirectly aided the local affiliate of al-Qaeda, the terrorist group which staged 9/11 and supposedly was America's enemy. Moreover, there was constant pressure on America to attack Iran, targeted by the US since 1953, when the CIA helped replace Tehran's democracy with a brutal tyrant, whose rule was highlighted by corruption, torture, and a nuclear program – which then was taken over by Iran's Islamic revolutionaries, to America's horror. ..."
"... The US now is pushing toward a Cold War redux with Russia, after successive administrations treated Moscow as if it was of no account, lying about plans to expand NATO and acting in other ways that the US would never tolerate. Imagine the Soviet Union helping to overthrow an elected, pro-American government in Mexico City, seeking to redirect all commerce to Soviet allies in South America, and proposing that Mexico join the Warsaw Pact. US policymakers would be threatening war. ..."
"... In different ways many US policies illustrate the problem caused by "passionate attachments" – the almost routine and sometimes substantial sacrifice of US economic and security interests to benefit other governments. For instance, hysteria swept Washington at the president's recent proposal to simply reduce troop levels in Germany, which along with so many other European nations sees little reason to do much to defend itself. There are even those who demand American subservience to the Philippines, a semi-failed state of no significant security importance to the US Saudi Arabia is a rare case where the attachment is mostly cash and lobbyists. In most instances cultural, ethnic, religious, and historical ties provide a firmer foundation for foreign political influence and manipulation. ..."
Jul 13, 2020 | original.antiwar.com

Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser, unkindly characterized the foreign policy establishment in Washington, D.C., as "the Blob." Although policymakers sometimes disagree on peripheral subjects, membership requires an absolute commitment to U.S. "leadership," which means a determination to micro-manage the world.

Reliance on persuasion is not enough. Vital is the willingness to bomb, invade, and, if necessary, occupy other nations to impose the Blob's dictates on other peoples. If foreigners die, as they often do, remember the saying about eggs and omelets oft repeated by communism's apologists. "Stuff happens" with the best-intentioned policies.

One might be inclined to forgive Blob members if their misguided activism actually benefited the American people. However, all too often the Blob's policies instead aid other governments and interests. Washington is overrun by the representatives of and lobbyists for other nations, which constantly seek to take control of US policy for their own advantage. The result are foreign interventions in which Americans do the paying and, all too often, the dying for others.

The problem is primarily one of power. Other governments don't spend a lot of time attempting to take over Montenegro's foreign policy because, well, who cares? Exactly what would you do after taking over Fiji's foreign ministry other than enjoy a permanent vacation? Seize control of international relations in Barbados and you might gain a great tax shelter.

Subvert American democracy and manipulate US foreign policy, and you can loot America's treasury, turn the US military into your personal bodyguard, and gain Washington's support for reckless war-mongering. And given the natural inclination of key American policymakers to intervene promiscuously abroad for the most frivolous reasons, it's surprisingly easy for foreign interests to convince Uncle Sam that their causes are somehow "vital" and therefore require America's attention. Indeed, it is usually easier to persuade Americans than foreign peoples in their home countries to back one or another international misadventure.

The culprits are not just autocratic regimes. Friendly democratic governments are equally ready to conspiratorially whisper in Uncle Sam's ear. Even nominally classical liberal officials, who believe in limiting their own governments, argue that Americans are obligated to sacrifice wealth and life for everyone else. The mantra seems to be liberty, prosperity, and peace for all – except those living in the superpower tasked by heaven with protecting everyone else's liberty, prosperity, and peace.

Although the problem has burgeoned in modern times, it is not new. Two centuries ago fans of Greek independence wanted Americans to challenge the Ottoman Empire, a fantastic bit of foolishness. Exactly how to effect an international Balkans rescue was not clear, since the president then commanded no aircraft carriers, air wings, or nuclear-tipped missiles. Still, the issue divided Americans and influenced John Quincy Adams' famous 1821 Independence Day address.

Warned Adams:

"Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom."

"The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force . She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit . [America's] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice."

Powerful words, yet Adams was merely following in the footsteps of another great American, George Washington. Obviously, the latter was flawed as a person, general, and president. Nevertheless, his willingness to set a critical precedent by walking away from power left an extraordinary legacy. As did his insistence that the Constitution tasked Congress with deciding when America would go to war. And his warning against turning US policy over to foreign influences.

Concern over obsequious subservience to other governments and interests pervaded his famous 1796 Farewell Address. Applied today, his message indicts most of the policy currently made in the city ironically named after him. He would be appalled by what presidents and Congresses today do, supposedly for America.

Obviously, the US was very different 224 years ago. The new country was fragile, sharing the Western hemisphere with its old colonial master, which still ruled Canada and much of the Caribbean, as well as Spain and France. When later dragged into the maritime fringes of the Napoleonic wars the US could huff and puff but do no more than inconvenience France and Britain. The vastness of the American continent, not overweening national power, again frustrated London when it sought to subjugate its former colonists.

Indeed, when George Washington spoke the disparate states were not yet firmly knit into a nation. Only after the Civil War, when the national government waged four years of brutal combat, which ravaged much of the country and killed upwards of 750,000 people in the name of "union," did people uniformly say the United States "is" rather than "are." However, the transformation was much more than rhetorical. The federal system that originally emerged in the name of individual liberty spawned a high tax centralized government that employed one of the world's largest militaries to kill on a mass scale to enforce the regime's dictates. The modern American "republic" was born. It acted overseas only inconsistently until World War II, after which imperial America was a constant, adding resonance to George Washington's message.

Today Washington, D.C.'s elites have almost uniformly decided that Russia is an enemy, irrespective of American behavior that contributed to Moscow's hostility. And that Ukraine, a country never important for American security, is a de facto military ally, appropriately armed by the US for combat against a nuclear-armed rival. A reelection-minded president seems determined to turn China into a new Cold War adversary, an enemy for all things perhaps for all time. America remains ever entangled in the Middle East, with successive administrations in permanent thrall of Israel and Saudi Arabia, allowing foreign leaders to set US Mideast policy. Indeed, both states have avidly pressed the administration to make their enemy, Iran, America' enemy. The resulting fixation caused the Trump administration to launch economic war against the rest of the world to essentially prevent everyone on earth from having any commercial dealing of any kind with anyone in Tehran.

Under Democrats and Republicans alike the federal government views nations that resist its dictates as adversaries at best, appropriate targets of criticism, always, sanctions, often, and even bombs and invasions, occasionally. No wonder foreign governments lobby hard to be designated as allies, partners, and special relationships. Many of these ties have become essentially permanent, unshakeable even when supposed friends act like enemies and supposed enemies are incapable of hurting America. US foreign policy increasingly has been captured and manipulated for the benefit of other governments and interests.

George Washington recognized the problem even in his day, after revolutionary France sought to win America's support against Great Britain. He warned: "nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest."

Is there a better description of US foreign policy today? Even when a favored nation is clearly, ostentatiously, murderously on the wrong side – consider Saudi Arabia's unprovoked aggression against Yemen – many American policymakers refuse to allow a single word of criticism to escape their lips. The US has indeed become "a slave," as George Washington warned.

The consequences for the US and the world are highly negative. He observed that "likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification."

This is an almost perfect description of the current US approach. American colonists revolted against what they believed had become ever more "foreign" control, yet the US backs Israel's occupation and mistreatment of millions of Palestinians. American policymakers parade the globe spouting the rhetoric of freedom yet subsidize Egypt as it imprisons tens of thousands and oppresses millions of people. Washington decries Chinese aggressiveness, yet provides planes, munitions, and intelligence to aid Riyadh in the slaughter of Yemeni civilians and destruction of Yemeni homes, businesses, and hospitals. In such cases, policymakers have betrayed America "into a participation in the quarrels and wars without adequate inducement or justification."

On the other side are the targets of "inveterate antipathies." This also characterizes US Middle East policy. So hated are Iran and Syria that Washington, DC is making every effort to destroy their economies, ruin their people's livelihoods, wreck their hospitals, and starve their population. The respective governments are bad, to be sure, but do not threaten the US Yet, as the nation's first president explained to Americans, "Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable, when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur. Hence, frequent collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests. The nation, prompted by ill-will and resentment, sometimes impels to war the government, contrary to the best calculations of policy."

Consider how close the US has come to foolish, unnecessary wars against both nations. There were manifold demands that the US enter the Syrian civil war, in which Americans have no stake. Short of combat the Obama administration indirectly aided the local affiliate of al-Qaeda, the terrorist group which staged 9/11 and supposedly was America's enemy. Moreover, there was constant pressure on America to attack Iran, targeted by the US since 1953, when the CIA helped replace Tehran's democracy with a brutal tyrant, whose rule was highlighted by corruption, torture, and a nuclear program – which then was taken over by Iran's Islamic revolutionaries, to America's horror.

Read George Washington and you would think he had gained a supernatural glimpse into today's policy debates. He worried about the result when the national government "adopts through passion what reason would reject; at other times it makes the animosity of the nation subservient to projects of hostility instigated by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives. The peace often, sometimes perhaps the liberty, of nations has been the victim."

What better describes US policy toward China and Russia? To be sure, these are nasty regimes. Yet that has rarely bothered Uncle Sam's relations with other states. Saudi Arabia, a corrupt and totalitarian theocracy, has been sheltered, protected, and reassured by the US even after invading its poor neighbor. Among Washington's other best friends: Bahrain, Turkey, Egypt, and United Arab Emirates, tyrannies all.

The US now is pushing toward a Cold War redux with Russia, after successive administrations treated Moscow as if it was of no account, lying about plans to expand NATO and acting in other ways that the US would never tolerate. Imagine the Soviet Union helping to overthrow an elected, pro-American government in Mexico City, seeking to redirect all commerce to Soviet allies in South America, and proposing that Mexico join the Warsaw Pact. US policymakers would be threatening war.

Washington, DC also is treating China as a near-enemy, claiming the right to control China along its own borders – essentially attempting to apply America's Monroe Doctrine to Asia. This is something Americans would never allow another nation, especially China, to do to the US Imagine the response if Beijing sent its navy up the East Coast, told the US how to treat Cuba, and constantly talked of the possibility of war. America's consistently hostile, aggressive policy is the result of "projects of pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives."

This kind of foreign policy also corrupts the American political system. It encourages officials and people to put foreign interests before that of America. As George Washington observed, this mindset: "gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; guiding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation."

For instance, Woodrow Wilson and America's Anglophile establishment backed Great Britain over the interests of the American people, dragging the US into World War I, a mindless imperial slugfest that this nation should have avoided. After the Cold War's end Americans with ties to Central and Eastern Europe pushed to expand NATO to their ancestral homes, which created new defense obligations for America while inflaming Russian hostility. Ethnic Greeks and Turks constantly battle over policy toward their ethnic homelands. Taiwan has developed enduring ties with congressional Republicans, especially, ensuring US government support against Beijing. Many evangelical Christians, especially those who hold a particularly bizarre eschatology (basically, Jews must gather together in their national homeland to be slaughtered before Jesus can return), back Israel in whatever it does to assist the apparently helpless God of creation finish his job. The policies that result from such campaigns inevitably are shaped to benefit foreign interests, not Americans.

Regarding the impact of such a system on the political system George Washington also was prescient: "As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public council. Such an attachment of a small or weak towards a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of the latter."

In different ways many US policies illustrate the problem caused by "passionate attachments" – the almost routine and sometimes substantial sacrifice of US economic and security interests to benefit other governments. For instance, hysteria swept Washington at the president's recent proposal to simply reduce troop levels in Germany, which along with so many other European nations sees little reason to do much to defend itself. There are even those who demand American subservience to the Philippines, a semi-failed state of no significant security importance to the US Saudi Arabia is a rare case where the attachment is mostly cash and lobbyists. In most instances cultural, ethnic, religious, and historical ties provide a firmer foundation for foreign political influence and manipulation.

What to do about such a long-standing problem? George Washington was neither naïf nor isolationist. He believed in what passed for globalism in those days: a commercial republic should trade widely. He didn't oppose alliances, for limited purposes and durations. After all, support from France was necessary for the colonies to win independence.

He proposed a practical policy tied to ongoing realities. The authorities should "steer clear of permanent alliances," have with other states "as little political connection as possible," and not "entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils" of other nations' "ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice." Most important, the object of US foreign policy was to serve the interests of the American people. In practice it was a matter of prudence, to be adapted to circumstance and interest. He would not necessarily foreclose defense of Israel, Saudi Arabia, or Germany, but would insist that such proposals reflect a serious analysis of current realities and be decided based on what is best for Americans. He would recognize that what might have been true a few decades ago likely isn't true today. In reality, little of current US foreign policy would have survived his critical review.

George Washington was an eminently practical man who managed to speak through the ages. America's recently disastrous experience of playing officious, obnoxious hegemon highlights his good judgment. The US, he argued, should "observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all."

America may still formally be a republic, but its foreign policy long ago became imperial. As John Quincy Adams warned, the US is "no longer the ruler of her own spirit." Americans have learned at great cost that international affairs are too important to be left to the Blob and foreign policy professionals, handed off to international relations scholars, or, worst of all, subcontracted to other nations and their lobbyists. The American people should insist on their nation's return to a true republican foreign policy.

Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute . A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire .

[Jul 13, 2020] Craig Murray about the glorification of war

Notable quotes:
"... Glorifying war is disturbing but so is the normalization of war. Most do not realize that large standing armies and large police forces were unknown/unusual only a century ago. ..."
"... And very few understand the mentality of the power-elite or how they have secreted themselves and their objectives behind gated communities, political divisiveness, and unaccountable 'national security' bullshit (more like 'war strategy'). ..."
Jul 13, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jackrabbit , Jul 13 2020 15:11 utc | 181

Craig Murray writes about the glorification of war:

The BBC World War Two Porn Page
Glorifying war is disturbing but so is the normalization of war. Most do not realize that large standing armies and large police forces were unknown/unusual only a century ago.

And very few understand the mentality of the power-elite or how they have secreted themselves and their objectives behind gated communities, political divisiveness, and unaccountable 'national security' bullshit (more like 'war strategy').

The ideologies of the Empire are: neoConservativism (a form of aristocracy); neoLiberalism (a form of facism); and Zionism (a form of colonialism).

In short, a combination of the worst inclinations in the Western tradition.

!!

[Jul 13, 2020] Here's a great must-see 36-minute piece by Abby Martin about the US perpetual occupation of Afghanistan.

Jul 13, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Canadian Cents , Jul 13 2020 0:04 utc | 115

Here's a great must-see 36-minute piece by Abby Martin about the US perpetual occupation of Afghanistan.

It was posted on YouTube on June 26, but I only came across it last night thanks to a Paul Craig Roberts article, and I don't think it's been mentioned here at MoA yet by anyone yet (at least I wasn't able to find any mentions using the MoA search.)

I'm sure many of us have come across many of the points over the years, but she does a great job of reviewing and bringing it all together.

Afghanistan War Exposed: An Imperial Conspiracy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3LFbOSPfrE

Google/Youtube has of course made the video "age-restricted", though I don't really see why, requiring sign-in and probably greatly reducing its viewership as a result.

This alternate link to the same video doesn't seem to require sign-in:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/C3LFbOSPfrE

[Jul 12, 2020] Trove of Leaked FBI, Fusion Center and DHS Documents Provide Insight Into Antifa, Charlottesville, Political Bias, and the Erosion of Civil Liberties by Eric Striker

Notable quotes:
"... The most interesting document of all is an intelligence assessment by DHS in the run up to the now famous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, which starkly contradicts the mainstream media and FBI's narrative. ..."
"... In a document dated August 9th, 2017, DHS wrote "We assess that anarchist extremists' use of violence as a means to oppose racism and white supremacist extremists' preparations to counterattack anarchist extremists are the principal drivers of violence at recent white supremacist rallies." ..."
"... Ideological uniformity is important in the FBI's relationship with local law enforcement, a flyer sent to law enforcement personnel in Texas shows. ..."
"... As Douglas Valentine points out, these fusion centers are Phoenix centers, which CIA developed in Vietnam to eradicate independent civil society. You can see the CIA mannerisms they teach the Junior Spy Cadets at the fusion center: pretend classmarks: (U//LES), Roger, Wilco, Over and Out! Breathless dumbshit cops get to use U just like real spies, but they don't get get collateral access and they have to make up little codes to try and blow off public records law. ..."
Jul 12, 2020 | www.unz.com

The Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC) reported similar information in its investigation of the Boston Free Speech Rally on August 19th, 2017. BRIC noted that the nationalist and free speech demonstrators, about 60 of them in total, had a permit for the event, while the anarchist groups that showed up to heckle-veto them were there illegally.

The leftist rioters began attacking the protesters, and later, began engaging in gratuitous yet apparently coordinated violence against police officers attempting to intervene, causing multiple injuries.

The most interesting document of all is an intelligence assessment by DHS in the run up to the now famous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, which starkly contradicts the mainstream media and FBI's narrative.

In a document dated August 9th, 2017, DHS wrote "We assess that anarchist extremists' use of violence as a means to oppose racism and white supremacist extremists' preparations to counterattack anarchist extremists are the principal drivers of violence at recent white supremacist rallies."

... ... ...

The close working relationship between mainstream social media companies, the FBI and "NGOs" (the ADL and SPLC) is clear and assumed, adding a new layer of understanding when it comes to tech censorship and the power of privately run organizations that are not subject general ethics or government accountability.

Ideological uniformity is important in the FBI's relationship with local law enforcement, a flyer sent to law enforcement personnel in Texas shows.

The event, hosted by the FBI for local cops, featured lectures on "hate" (which is not a crime) from a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church and the ex-lead singer of a skinhead rock band. The conference was hosted in December 2017, so one can only imagine this indoctrination has gotten more intense since then.

Ultimately, we can gather from these documents a climate of incompetence, rejection of facts for political reasons, and a culture of selective prosecution. Those who post memes making fun of the election are treated as conspirators against the Constitutional rights of others, while anarchists who actively conspire in the open to do the same are rarely prosecuted by the FBI.

The most disturbing aspect of all this is how groups like the Anti-Defamation League appear to have more sway over the FBI's investigative priorities than intelligence provided to them by local fusion centers.

It appears that in defense of their power, our elites are willing to do away with all liberal pretenses and take on "emergency orders" that ultimately punishes peaceful dissent while allowing real criminals to go free.


Farrakhan.DDuke.AliceWalker.AllAgree , says: July 11, 2020 at 2:31 am GMT

Local police are doing good work:

Law enforcement is fully aware of who provokes the fighting and rioting at riots: the left. The documents from fusion centers across the country (intelligence provided by local police departments) repeatedly report this.

But

Both the FBI and to a lesser extent the Department of Homeland Security are far more concerned with political ideology and creating propaganda than upholding the law.

,
Phung Hoang , says: July 11, 2020 at 1:23 pm GMT

As Douglas Valentine points out, these fusion centers are Phoenix centers, which CIA developed in Vietnam to eradicate independent civil society. You can see the CIA mannerisms they teach the Junior Spy Cadets at the fusion center: pretend classmarks: (U//LES), Roger, Wilco, Over and Out! Breathless dumbshit cops get to use U just like real spies, but they don't get get collateral access and they have to make up little codes to try and blow off public records law.

This is why when asshole cops strangle you, you can't complain to the city. CIA controls the cops, not the city. This is most obvious in NYPD, with actual CIA secret police like Sanchez and Cohen, arresting you like cops to facilitate illegal CIA domestic spying. DHS and FBI are in there too, of course, fishing for dissent to repress but they're controlled by CIA focal points.

So next time a pig kneels on your head you can't just burn down the precinct, you have to burn down the CIA fusion center, and Langley too.

anon [234] Disclaimer , says: July 11, 2020 at 2:17 pm GMT

Aside from siccing cops on the latest internal enemies, CIA also uses fusion centers to propagate the party line to cops, who will credulously swallow it and pass it on to show off their double-secret spy connections. For instance, they circulated alt media disinfo claiming KGB killed JFK. This happened to coincide with Unz and other bravura JFK coup exposes, and with CIA's Russiagate fiasco.

Reg Cæsar , says: July 11, 2020 at 3:30 pm GMT

If these people are in league with the state, anarchist is the last word to describe them.

Curmudgeon , says: July 11, 2020 at 4:10 pm GMT

"We assess that anarchist extremists' use of violence as a means to oppose racism and white supremacist extremists' preparations to counterattack anarchist extremists are the principal drivers of violence at recent white supremacist rallies."

Is there a bigger political statement than this? The anarchist extremists aren't opposing racism, they are opposing the government(s). "White supremacist" is a pejorative label used to discredit people's right to free assembly. Clearly, the only investigating the FBI does is on whom it decides are political opponents.

kuraudo , says: July 12, 2020 at 6:21 am GMT

I find it incredibly frustrating that all of this scandalous information is out there confirming what we already knew to be true and yet these organizations, the media, and especially elected officials continue on as if this isn't the case. It's vexing. Frustrating. Enraging.

If this was a dictatorship, at least we could rage against that, but because it has the words "democracy" slapped onto it, we are supposedly able to change things. And yet, representative democracy has proven that nothing changes if the elites do not will it. It's just a vile scheme by plutocrats to keep us in chains of our own imagination: "well, we voted for this so I have to live with the results," no we didn't, and do we truly?

Zarathustra , says: July 12, 2020 at 4:28 am GMT

I can tell you this. what is happening in US now, in Communism was not even remotely close that bad.

Anonymous [661] • Disclaimer , says: July 12, 2020 at 11:28 am GMT
@Zarathustra

I think Solzhenitsyn would respectfully disagree on behalf of the 66 million Russian Christians who were tortured, raped and slaughtered during 1917-1989, not to mention the fourteen years he spent locked up in the gulags run by Jewish Communists.

Might also be a few Ukrainians who disagree with your assessment given the 11-17 million murdered by Jewish Bolsheviks in the 1932 Holodomor, which to my knowledge is still the single biggest genocide in human history.

onebornfree , says: • Website July 12, 2020 at 12:02 pm GMT

This just in:

1] the FBI, as well as the CIA and 1000's of other federal agencies, is an entirely unconstitutional federal agency.

Levtraro , says: July 12, 2020 at 12:09 pm GMT
@Exile

Then we'd have a position of strength from which to force the end to Jewish occupation of America – which is necessary before the rest of the world's gentile populations, particularly Europe, can take similar action.

America freeing herself will be good for America, but not necessary for other nations. For instance, Putin freed Russia from her oligarchs, the overwhelming majority of them Jewish, well before America had shown any progress on this matter. Actually, Russia freed herself in spite of America!

Stupid Pig Tricks , says: July 12, 2020 at 1:08 pm GMT

Here's a sample of the busywork CIA gives the crookedest stupidest cops in the Phoenix/fusion centers, the worms like Tom Gerard.

https://mobile.twitter.com/jmorse_/status/1280527030484742144/photo/1

White man's welfare, they call it. They hold pigs in contempt just like everybody else. But this is how CIA finds the eager beaver cops who'll break the law to suck up and play James Bond with them.

That beaner psycho Sanchez blabbed CIA's real intention while he was illegally spying undercover as a NYPD pig: they don't just want to solve crimes, they want to keep you from committing crimes in the first place. They think it's their job to to keep you under control. These drug-dealing, gun-running, money-laundering, kiddy-pimping criminal scumbags rule your country because they can kill you and torture you and get away with it. Even if you're the president. Your government is CIA, and CIA is a totalitarian state. Until you storm Langley like the Germans stormed the Stasi, all your reforms and revolutions are worth shit.

KenH , says: July 12, 2020 at 2:53 pm GMT

Antifa members routinely cross state lines to violate the civil rights of those they perceive as "fascists" yet the FBI does nothing. Since it's obvious the FBI is dominated by partisan leftists who are either sympathetic with antifa (and BLM) or actively colluding them them against pro-white and right of center groups engaged in lawful but politically incorrect activity.

The FBI is clearly taking their marching orders from the ADL who's lobbied them for years to take a more active and hostile stance towards the pro-white and anti-semitic right. But given the leftist ideological proclivities of the average special agent and their superiors this wasn't that hard of a sell.

The FBI declared that it would begin investigating memes posted on Twitter intended to satirize low civic education by telling people to vote for Hillary Clinton via text message as a "Conspiracy Against Rights Provided by the Constitution and Laws of the United States"

Yet the FBI did absolutely nothing about the black panthers intimidating voters at a Philly precinct in 2008. Their illegal actions were witnessed by several poll watchers yet the Obama/Holder DOJ promptly dropped the charges upon taking office.

The FBI is awash in naked partisanship and corruption and should have at least 25% of its funding cut and be barred from surveilling or infiltrating groups engaged in politically incorrect but lawful activity. It's become an appendage of the Democrat party and radical left wing establishment and should be treated as such.

Pop Warner , says: July 12, 2020 at 2:56 pm GMT
@Reg Cæsar

I usually refer to them as neoliberals because there's little that separates the beliefs of antifa and the board of JP Morgan

Ace , says: July 12, 2020 at 5:24 pm GMT
@GMC

the USA, which is a totally failed country – domestically.

There it is. The U.S.A. does not serve the interests of the majority of the population.

Richard B , says: July 12, 2020 at 6:33 pm GMT
@BL

Great comment.

Unite The Right Rally was a so obviously an ADL/$PLC/FBI Production.

I haven't seen choreography that blatant and stiff since the Lee Harvey Oswald assassination.

Priss Factor , says: • Website July 12, 2020 at 8:04 pm GMT
@Anonymous

You are both right. Soviet Communism was far more murderous and brutal, BUT the West faces a greater crisis. After all, communism didn't wipe Russia off the map, and indeed, Russians began to regain control and power after Stalin's death. Also, Stalin had done much to check Jewish Power, and there was a kind of cultural conservatism in many walks of life.

... ... ...

steinbergfeldwitzcohen , says: July 12, 2020 at 8:29 pm GMT
@Levtraro to HIM and had City of London-Israeli financing. So what actually happened is that the Jews, who had been ousted from power by Krushchev and Brezhnev in the post-ww2 era, got back into positions of economic power in Russia. A position that, as I noted, they had lost. This idea that Putin is a nationalist is simply not true. He is a Jew-boy lapdog who takes his orders from Tel Aviv and London..
The Soviet economy has significant State ownership. Part of what Putin did was to put the oil industry back into the hands of the State so the State would have the Revenues. Most countries do this with Oil and Gas revenue. It is very popular and provides employment and desperately needed money to pay the paltry pensions many Russians subside on.
Russia hasn't been free since 1917 and is still not free. To believe otherwise is to be blinded by Eastern Jewish smoke and mirrors.
Robjil , says: July 12, 2020 at 11:28 pm GMT
@Jiminy

The idea of separation of Church (Synagogue) and State is one way that we could get back our "freedoms".

... ... ...

Robjil , says: July 12, 2020 at 11:32 pm GMT
@steinbergfeldwitzcohen

Chabbad is not having the time of its life in Russia. Neither are Zion uber alles like in our Congress. It quite different in Russia. Russia has a bit more freedom that we do from Zion uber alles.

https://chabadinfo.com/news/another-shliach-kicked-out-of-russia/

For the eighth time this past decade, Russian authorities told a foreign Chabad rabbi living in Russia to leave the country.

Josef Marozof, a New York-born rabbi who began working 12 years ago for Chabad in the city of Ulyanovsk 400 miles east of Moscow, was ordered earlier this week to leave because the FSB security service said he had been involved in unspecified "extremist behavior."

[Jul 10, 2020] The 'Camo Economy' Hides Military Costs and Exacerbates Inequality

Jul 10, 2020 | inequality.org

t includes Iraq and Afghanistan, 53,000 to 35,000. Deaths of U.S. contractors since September 2001 are approximately 8,000, compared to 7,000 troops. Yet contractors receive neither the public recognition nor the honor of serving abroad, despite the increased risks they face. The Camo Economy is politically useful, as the White House can claim troop reductions while at the same time increasing U.S. presence abroad by relying more heavily on contractors.

The financial costs of military contracting are also opaque. While we know some top-line numbers, we know very few details about where our tax dollars go once they are paid out to contractors. We do know that contracting is more expensive, as contractors have limited incentives to reduce costs and they build profits into their contract agreements. As contractors then use sub-contractors, who also build in profits, there can be multiple layers of guaranteed profits built into a contract between the sub-contractors performing the work and DOD paying the prime contractor. Add in the waste, fraud, and abuse in addition to the excessive profits, and the costs to government quickly balloon.

It will not be easy to reform the Camo Economy. Firms such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon each spent about $13 million on lobbying last year. Political connections operate alongside high profits and paychecks to keep the Camo Economy entrenched and growing. But reforms can be made. Reducing the size of the military budget is a vital first step. The National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies has detailed various ways to do this.

Next, the portion of military spending that is paid to contractors should be reduced and some services should be brought back in-house, including those on and near the battlefield. And third, the contracting process itself should be reformed, so that more contracts are legitimately competitive and create incentives for firms to reduce costs.

Heidi Peltier is Director of "20 Years of War," a Costs of War initiative based at Boston University's Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. She is also a board member of the Institute for Policy Studies.

[Jul 09, 2020] The racket of national security

Jul 09, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Grieved , Jul 9 2020 15:59 utc | 8

Back in the CHOICES thread, we had discussion on the US bullying Iran, and the semantics of whether the US was engaging in "war" against Iran. I hope not to get caught up in those semantics again, but here are a couple of good pieces to show the situation.

The latest Renegade Inc episode interviews Gareth Porter, who draws from Smedley Butler and talks about the "racket" of the security state of the US, which acts only to perpetuate and extend itself, and to increase its funding by all means.

The racket of national security

The episode answers several questions about the US posture towards Iran. Porter supplies the history and background to illustrate the US anger for Iran. Sharmine Narwani makes an appearance also, and together they show why the Pentagon will never conduct acts of war against Iran that will provoke the kind of overt retaliation that Iran delivered by targeting the US bases this year.

The US will only conduct acts that Iran will not overtly respond to. It will escalate its theater right up to that red line, but if it crosses the line - as it did with killing Soleimani - it will be by miscalculation. The only purpose of the US security state is to escalate the threat level to keep the funding coming, and to leave no possible margin for de-funding by Congress. It's a racket, and the racket has swallowed all statecraft.

Once I suggested seriously that Ukraine could not be understood in terms of statecraft, but only in terms of thievery. It becomes increasingly clear that the tenets of organized crime are now the only way to parse US action.

~~

Iran meanwhile, lives by statecraft. It will always respond when that red line is crossed - always and without hesitation. My view is that Iran is continuously working for the total departure of the US from West Asia, as it said that it would in retribution for Soleimani. Much of what it does we don't see, but I note the "resistance" axis goes from strength to strength in solidarity. It was ready to erupt when Iran attacked the US base, but the US disengaged and this unified axis of several nations and forces stood down.

So the school of thought presented for example by Richard Steven Hack here, that the US will war on Iran for decades if it can, simply to feed the MIC, is correct. What's not correct is that the US can perform much in the way of military action against Iran.

We stumbled over the word "war" so perhaps we can talk about minor activities of warfare, which are not enough to bring the theater to full battle. All the nations in the region have tolerated US incursions because to fight them head on would provoke escalation that serves less purpose than living with them - there is a time for everything.

But we have to understand the red lines. And we have to understand that because we see nothing moving, it doesn't mean nothing is moving. Narwani makes some good points about that - and see her full interview on Renegade from last year for a good understanding of what Iran is as a nation and an adversary. It's clear that the Pentagon agrees with her.

As to the Resistance axis, this interview with Lebanese analyst Anees Naqqash is worth a quick read. It tells us much about Lebanon.

US should know 'Resistance' now controls all of West Asia: Naqqash

It is not the case that Iran is doing nothing in response to US warfare against it and its regional allies. The red flag is still flying, and the Iranians take it seriously.

[Jul 07, 2020] War is no longer about winning. Endless conflict is the name of the game. Military defense contractors are the most influential of all lobbyists

Jul 07, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

450.org , Jul 7 2020 2:06 utc | 99

@96

War is no longer about winning. Endless conflict is the name of the game. Military defense contractors are the most influential of all lobbyists and so intertwined in government that it's truly & effectively fascist. Profit is the end, war is the means.


Jackrabbit , Jul 7 2020 2:28 utc | 102

Wait ... what?
<> <> <> <> <>

IMO Trump has started wars but the countries and peoples he picks on know that it's best not to respond too forcibly or they invite greater damage.

I'm surprised that moa commenters give any credence to the claims that portray Trump as peaceful/peace-loving. In addition to his belligerence, Empire front-man Trump has initiated a huge military build-up, ended long-standing peace treaties, and militarized space.

!!

Edward , Jul 7 2020 2:56 utc | 106

This is the standard Washington rhetoric that accompanies their coup attempts. It is a companion to the "moderate democracy" rhetoric about U.S. satellite governments like Saudi Arabia. The rhetoric tells you that these people have zero interest in democracy, honesty, or avoiding hypocrisy. Some of Bush's neocons are Biden Supporters; what a surprise.

Don Bacon , Jul 7 2020 3:13 utc | 108

@ Jackrabbit 102
re: Isn't USA effectively at war with Venezuela?. . .etc
Obviously you don't know jack about actual war, do you.
Or give us your creds?

Grieved , Jul 7 2020 4:28 utc | 109
I dropped back in to see what follows...imagine my deflation to find that people don't know what war is.

@108 Don Bacon

Precisely. No one who has ever experienced the tragedy of war will ever mistake the playground games of make-believe war with the real thing.

~~

That's the problem with the US administration, and its satraps and the many camp followers and court jesters who follow it. They don't know the difference between posturing war and waging war.

The difference is so profound that it calls for not only a new language but a new departure point of reference within one's soul even to begin to speak of such things.

The US will pursue the make-believe war it postures through in order to score points within its small group circle. But real war, should it ever come to touch it - and it will if it pursues its childishness too far - will shock it into total frozen fear the moment that it strikes.

Iran knew this, and had the human strength to test it and to prove it. Everything else, up to this point, was an accommodation by the world's nations to the posturing of the US for its own internal coherence. It was a matter of supporting the US ego rather than of being close to the event when that ego falls apart, with potentially explosive consequences.

But Iran had the strength of character to stand on its principles, and to proclaim its truth. And by the way, that stand is by no means done, despite what the trolls may suggest. Iran has barely begun its action to remove the US from Southwest Asia, and we will only see the footprints of its actions as we realize that the US has departed. And this will happen, regardless of the US narrative and its many parrots.

~~

I don't blame the US or any of its supporters for threatening war when all it really does is act as a nuisance and a spoiler in those few platforms left to it. Those it oppresses have so far mostly chosen to bear the insult rather than to make a fuss. But Iran has shown the way, and one should not expect many more of those oppressed to put up with the abuse from the US many more times.

What is clearly known is that the very last thing the US can do is go to war, in the real meaning of that term. The very last thing the US is capable of, is war. And the generals of all the nations of the world know this because they have seen the proof of it. Anyone who doesn't see the proof of it is behind the curve, and may well have license to comment here and elsewhere, but fortunately does not sit in the security councils of the nations of the world.

~~

If anyone wants to think that the US is "effectively" at war with another nation, then consider that Iran is absolutely "effectively" at war with the US, just as Hezbollah is beyond any doubt at war with Israel. And so what? When positions are "effectively" this or that, then they had better produce "effective" results. And it is only from these effective results that we can count the coup of the engagement. Hezbollah and Iran don't need to be told the difference between real attacks and propaganda attacks.

What they count is the real force.

Everything else is bluster. And I was 16 years old myself once, so in all humility I don't condemn this braggadocio, which I understand all too humanly.

But neither do I take it as real in the real world.

Don Bacon , Jul 7 2020 4:47 utc | 110
@ Grieved 109
Thanks for helping to deliver us from all that illusory make-believe on war from the deep thinkers who apparently man this place. And yes, Iran has shown the way, which includes its ability to put a serious hurt on US forces if attacked. We're talking about the possibility of lots of US dead bodies, military and dependents, men women and children, also sunken ships, and not just some supporting proxies and aerial bombing with the attendant publicity that suggests to some that genuine war exists, when it doesn't.
People need to get real.
Jackrabbit , Jul 7 2020 5:26 utc | 112

Trump is really no different than Clinton, GWBush, and Obama. Each a front-man for the Deep State/Empire. Each portrayed as well-meaning, peace-loving men that were FORCED! to war for all the right reasons. In that context, these Jedi mind-tricks fall flat:


!!
Mao , Jul 7 2020 5:52 utc | 113

With only four months left to the U.S. presidential elections, and the increasing likelihood of Donald Trump, the most pro-Israel President in history, losing, Israel has been trying to provoke Iran to start a war, so that it can drag the United State into it. This is not anything new. For over a decade Benjamin Netanyahu has been trying to force the United States to go to war with Iran, and Israel itself almost attacked Iran three times between 2010 and 2011. But the with events of the last several months darkening the prospects of a second Trump term, Israel feels a new urgency for a war with Iran.

For over two years Israel tried to provoke Iran by attacking Iranian-backed Shiite forces in Syria, but Iran has opted not to retaliate. Since the attacks did not provoke Iran to retaliate, and also failed to dislodge Iran's military advisers and the Shiite forces that it trained, armed, and dispatched to Syria, Israel has seemingly turned to attacking Iran directly within its borders.

The events of past two months in Iran are indicative of Israel's new push for war. These events include large-scale infernos, explosions, and cyberattacks, all believed to have been carried out by Israel and its Iranian proxies, the "fake opposition" which is the part of the opposition that supports economic sanctions and military attacks against Iran, and has even allied itself with small secessionist groups that carry out terrorist attacks inside Iran.

https://original.antiwar.com/sahimi/2020/07/05/israel-is-trying-to-provoke-iran-to-start-a-war/

Mao , Jul 7 2020 6:23 utc | 114

In this video, Prof. Wolff talks about the breakdown of the capitalist system and outlines 4 major problems that the US has been faced with without for quite some time with no solution in sight: climate change, capitalism's intrinsic instability, systemic racism inherited from slavery, and lastly the lack of mechanisms to manage viruses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HRWWRFyEc8

In this video, Prof. Wolff compares and contrasts the preparation for and management of COVID-19 with how the US has managed military preparedness and the handling of military confrontations and activities. It has succeeded at one and completely failed at the other. He explains why.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAo_QJAsOGg

AskProfWolff: How the Fed Serves Capitalism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reHa7VVnhT8

Richard Steven Hack , Jul 7 2020 6:36 utc | 115
Posted by: Grieved | Jul 7 2020 1:09 utc | 96 Prediction: The US may start a war but the US will not finish that war. Its opponent will end that war, by causing unacceptable losses to the US - something quite easily achieved, and already proved to the world by Iran in this very year of 2020.

I agree. The US can not defeat Iran, short of nuking Tehran, which is not in the cards for geopolitical reasons. However, the US can devastate much of Iran's civilian infrastructure, which, like most such infrastructures, can't run and hide. The US can also kill a million or two milllion Iranians, as it proved in Iraq.

All that will do, however, is merely guarantee that Iran will never surrender. Nor would Iran ever surrender in the first place. Which is why I tend to reference the upcoming war as the "New Thirty Years War". The clear example is the near twenty years we've spent in Afghanistan - which is vastly weaker than Iran. Each war - Vietnam, Afghanistan, and arguably Iraq - has lasted longer than the last and with failure as an outcome.

The US can keep attacking Iran from the air and sea for thirty years - but without ever defeating Iran. It will do so because the military-industrial complex will make profits every year from that war - and in the end, that's all that matters to the US (along with the

Only if the US tries a land invasion will the US lose a massive number of troops. But even that will come over time, albeit at a *much* higher rate than the US saw in either Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. US annual casualties would probably be in the low to medium 5 digits per year, as opposed to the low 4 digits in most of those wars. In other words, four or five times the rate in Iraq. That's as compared with a hot war in North Korea which would see 50,000 US casualties in the first ninety days, or any war with China or Russia. See "United States military casualties of war" on Wikipedia. It's possible that casualties could rise to the level of WWI, if the war lasts five or ten years, or even WWII if it lasts twenty - or even higher if it lasts thirty.

Most people think the US will not try a land invasion. I've argued, however, that the *only* way to even attempt to prevent Iran from closing the Straits for the duration of the war will be for the US to put several score thousand Marines and US troops on Iran's shores to attempt to prevent launching of mines and anti-ship missiles. This would be difficult since Iran has a long Persian Gulf shoreline, Iran has fortified that shoreline, there are many places to launch weapons from that shoreline - and any such US troops would be subject to both conventional and guerrilla war by the Iranian military and perhaps a million or more Iranian Basij militia. Nonetheless, the US is likely to be dumb enough to try.

In any event, the US will eventually be forced to withdraw either because the US electorate would eventually tire of the war - although as Afghanistan proves, that could take a *very* long time, mostly depending on the casualty rate, however, as I indicateed - or because another "threat" takes precedence, which would likely mean either Russia or China.

"And the US will strain its mighty Wurlitzer to the utmost to declare victory as it retreats."

Yup. And the sad part is that the US electorate will probably believe that, then forget about the reality and be willing to commit to a new war within another ten years.

Jackrabbit , Jul 7 2020 6:36 utc | 116
Mao @Jul7 5:52 #113

increasing likelihood of Donald Trump, the most pro-Israel President in history, losing

1) The USA establishment are all pro-Israel.

2) Biden has proclaimed himself a Zionist.

3) In 2016 all the polls had Clinton ahead.

Fake populist outsiders (like Trump) have to be shown to defeat the establishment. That helps to sell them as being on the side of the people.

!!

Richard Steven Hack , Jul 7 2020 7:00 utc | 119
In addition to the above, the idea that because there's a difference between "war" and "conflicts before war" there is *no chance* of war is absurd.

Every war started with this sort of enmity between nations historically. As I've said before, with this level of enmity between the US and Iran, and arguably between the US and Russia, and the US and China, war is inevitable. With the latter two countries, such a war is likely to be nuclear - which is why it hasn't happened yet - that risk is *way* too high (although it can still happen if a miscalculation causes a conventional war, which then escalates into nuclear.)

A war with Iran doesn't have that risk. No nuclear power that I am aware of is going to enter the war on Iran's side and thus risk a nuclear war over Iran. Iran itself will not develop or use nuclear weapons. Israel *might* consider using nuclear weapons against Iran - that would be a*huge* mistake geopolitically and probably result in Israel's destruction by geopolitical means if not by military means. But neither Russia nor China are going to directly engage the US military to defend Iran. That would be stupid and putting their own national survival at risk for the benefit of another nation. As Percival Rose would say, "That ain't gonna happen."

The real problem for some people is cognitive dissonance. They can't emotionally accept the possibility of these wars occurring - so they don't. They are reduced to saying, "well, it hasn't happened...yet."

The "yet" is the operative term. There is no logical extension of that term to mean "never".

Jackrabbit , Jul 7 2020 7:03 utc | 120
Richard Steven Hack @Jul7 6:36 115

There are many other mistaken assumptions, such as:


!!
arby , Jul 7 2020 11:59 utc | 123

IMO, the word "WAR" means two sides are fighting.

What is plain to see is all of these "wars" are not wars but provocations, aggression from one side and bullying. In every case the other side does not want a war.

Interesting how the US has way upped its aggression on Venezuela without a peep from the people. This started off with some nonsense about an idiot named Guaido and is now full blown nastiness.

Digital Spartacus , Jul 7 2020 12:59 utc | 125

@120

Sadly they are not the only stooges. It beggars belief that people everywhere believe that they can elect someone to change the system in the country in which they reside. Political stripes have very little meaning as the differences are incremental at best. The bureaucracies necessary to keep the modern systems of governance afloat are staggeringly monolithic. Electing one individual, or party, or parties and presuming that the system will somehow be improved upon is a laughable fantasy. It leads to a continuous cycle of four years of initiatives to tear down the previous four years initiatives unless you're a second term government. But actual change is still the sole purview of the entrenched bureaucracy or "deep state" or whatever other label you prefer. To Jackrabbit's point, most decisions hinge on whether or not the bureaucracies in charge believe a war, a social change etc. can be implemented and a desired result achieved. It takes a finely developed sense of myopia to think that the only stooges are those of the political class. Says volumes about the people that put them there, and continues to suggest that they are electing "change".
As an aside, the Frank Zappa quote that "government is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex" remains potently poignant.

arby , Jul 7 2020 15:52 utc | 134

Calling what the US is doing to these countries "war" is like saying that Floyd was in a fight with the cop's knee.
Yes,there has been some very measured retaliation from some of the victims, but it amounts to Floyd saying he can't breathe.

PleaseBeleafMe , Jul 7 2020 16:11 utc | 135

@450 132
The provocations and responses of the formation of a war with Iran have been very interesting and I think that if Iran hadn't of shot down the Ukrainian airliner after their attack against the American base we may have already or continue to witness that war. As I see it there was a real hard on to go after Iran but word of the shoot down allowed the Don to pull back and let Iran suffer the black mark without escalation.
There are way too many itchy trigger fingers and pretexts for this and that can be easily engineered and sold to the masses. Helps Biden or whomever if he can blame the future cluster fuck on cleaning up donnies mess. I expect something expectedly unexpected in the coming months.

450.org , Jul 7 2020 16:59 utc | 139

@134

War is not a static proposition and its meaning and definition can and should change over time to fit the prevailing military strategies and economic paradigm of the day. We don't live and operate in an unassailable lexicon vacuum. War is not defined tautologically, meaning, war is not war. War is many things and can be fought on many dimensional fronts, meaning not just militarily.

Jackrabbit , Jul 7 2020 17:25 utc | 144

arby @Jul7 17:12 @141

I think war is a state of mind. That's why we talk about "the war on poverty" or a "propaganda war".

You might say that there is a "Cold War" but the number of acts of war is too numerous for that and targeted at multiple countries/peoples. It's more like a 'hybrid war' on everyone that opposes the New World Order that the AZ Empire seeks to impose on the planet.

Importantly, you can't prevent war if you only start thinking of it as 'war' when the shooting starts.

!!

[Jul 06, 2020] Israel is becoming a fascist country

Jul 06, 2020 | m.jpost.com

Right conclusion but the argument made is superficial:

[Jul 05, 2020] Watch: Protesters Pull Down Christopher Columbus Statue In Baltimore, Dump In Harbor

Looks like the most powerful complain for re-election of Trump
Jul 05, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

The statue, dedicated in 1984, is the latest monument to be destroyed in what President Trump dubbed the "left-wing cultural revolution" by "angry mobs."

According to the Baltimore Sun , the Columbus statue has been the site of a wreath-laying ceremony right before the annual Columbus Day parade, which, in 2019 was replaced with the Italian Heritage Festival.

Republican state delegates and Italian-American activists held a press conference at the statue last month to ask Gov. Larry Hogan and Baltimore Mayor Bernard C. "Jack" Young to preserve and protect the memorials , following activists' comments about pulling down the monuments themselves and the introduction of a City Council bill this week to rename one of them in honor of victims of police violence.

The downed statue is one of three monuments to Columbus in Baltimore. - Baltimore Sun

https://twitter.com/i/status/1279588928736104449

erhaps some thoughts by Matt Taibbi are worth repeating ( via SubStack ):

Much of America has watched in quizzical silence in recent weeks as crowds declared war on an increasingly incoherent succession of historical symbols. Maybe you nodded as Confederate general Albert Pike was toppled or even when Christopher Columbus was beheaded, but it got a little weird when George Washington was emblazoned with "Fuck Cops" and set on fire , or when they went after Ulysses S. Grant , abolitionist Colonel Hans Christian Heg , " Forward ," (a seven-foot-tall female figure meant to symbolize progress ), the Portland, Oregon " Elk statue ," or my personal favorite, the former slave Miguel de Cervantes , whose cheerful creations Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were apparently mistaken for reals and had their eyes lashed red in San Francisco.

Was a What the Fuck? too much to ask? It was! In the space of a few weeks the level of discourse in the news media dropped so low, the fear of being shamed as a deviationist so high, that most of the weirder incidents went uncovered. Leading press organs engaged in real-time Soviet-style airbrushing. Here's how the Washington Post described a movement that targeted Spanish missionary Junipero Serra , Abraham Lincoln (a " single-handed symbol of white supremacy ," according to UW-Madison students), an apple cider press sculpture , abolitionist Mathias Baldwin , and the first all-Black volunteer regiment in the Civil War , among others.


lockandload , 52 seconds ago

BLM thugs have already started going after patriots. They ambushed our governor at the small town of Ackley Iowa. They were stalking her as she visited companies providing essential services during the pandemic. Her driver refused to stop, likely saving her life. One BLM thug was hit but not seriously injured. They are not waiting to run out of statues. We ordinary Americans must be heavily armed at all times now. Midwest states are full of illegals, who serve the left as an army. Open civil war is upon us whether we would have it or not.

warsev , 3 minutes ago

What these malicious rioters don't realize is that they are handing the November election to DJT and Republicans for senate and house. Average Americans look on the footage that accompanies this article with revulsion; for the ideas and the people behind them. Trump will walk away with 2020. Just keep it up, loony lefties.

vic and blood , 4 minutes ago

We have been in a race and culture war with multiple factions for some time. The presumed winner is not overtly participating.

Most white people are oblivious, though that is changing. Too bad we are demographically doomed.

SolidGold , 1 minute ago

Divide and conquer. Who creates that genius?

NumberNone , 12 minutes ago

Was in downtown Baltimore less than 2 years ago, it felt like you were one person away from someone that wanted to rob you. The downtown had all the usual suspects of faux high end shopping but the vibe was one of John Wayne Gacy in his clown suit...it had all the look and feel that was supposed to make you happy but it was rotten to the core.

Whoa Dammit , 13 minutes ago

We can't keep coddling these stupid brats. It's time to start making their parents pay for the mess and destruction that their ill raised offspring cause.

GoldRulesPaperDrools , 17 minutes ago

Protesters == pavement apes

House of Cards , 17 minutes ago

Terrorists you mean

Watt Supremacissss , 16 minutes ago

Crybullies.

GoldRulesPaperDrools , 15 minutes ago

Redundant but accurate ... +100_000

Silver Savior , 17 minutes ago

Columbus was a dickhead anyway.

NumberNone , 9 minutes ago

So we tear apart the country for a guy that held a gun to a pregnant woman's stomach...if you're gonna pass judgement and replace other people's icons you might want to make better choices.

Blackdawg7 , 43 minutes ago

I've never been a fan of Christopher Columbus but witnessing these know-nothing sanctimonious twits destroy public property while virtue signalling makes my blood boil.

Workdove , 44 minutes ago

Not worth the 10 years in jail...

vic and blood , 50 minutes ago

History's losers are terrorizing, and soon to be tyrannizing us because Caucasians are too civilized and docile.

Every race and tribe is programmed by God to attempt to dominate.

As an adherent of the non-aggression principle, I don't care for the binary choice, but accept it.

Either dominate or be dominated. Only cucks believe in co-existence. I assure you our rivals do not believe in peaceful co-existence.

unionbroker , 1 hour ago

Christopher Columbus sails out into the unknown where no man has gone before. What the **** has BLM done. Put the statues back up and throw BLM in the water

[Jul 05, 2020] Afghanistan and the Endless War Caucus by DANIEL LARISON

Looks like Liz Cheney words for Russians. Her action suggest growing alliance between Bush repoblicans and neolibral interventionaistsof the Democratic Party. The alliance directed against Trump.
Notable quotes:
"... As Boland explains, the amendment passed by the committee yesterday sets so many conditions on withdrawal that it makes it all but impossible to satisfy them: ..."
"... The longer that the U.S. stays at war in Afghanistan, the more incentives other states will have to make that continued presence more costly for the U.S. When the knee-jerk reaction in Washington to news of these bounties is to throw up obstacles to withdrawal, that gives other states another incentive to do more of this. ..."
"... Prolonging our involvement in the war amounts to playing into Moscow's hands. For all of their posturing about security and strength, hard-liners routinely support destructive and irrational policies that redound to the advantage of other states. This is still happening with the war in Afghanistan, and if these hard-liners get their way it will continue happening for many years to come. ..."
Jul 03, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The immediate response to a story that U.S. forces were being targeted is to keep fighting a losing conflict.

Barbara Boland reported yesterday on the House Armed Services Committee's vote to impede withdrawal of U.S. from Afghanistan:

The House Armed Services Committee voted Wednesday night to put roadblocks on President Donald Trump's vow to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, apparently in response to bombshell report published by The New York Times Friday that alleges Russia paid dollar bounties to the Taliban in Afghanistan to kill U.S troops.

It speaks volumes about Congress' abdication of its responsibilities that one of the few times that most members want to challenge the president over a war is when they think he might bring it to an end. Many of the members that want to block withdrawals from other countries have no problem when the president wants to use U.S. forces illegally and to keep them in other countries without authorization for years at a time. The role of hard-liner Liz Cheney in pushing the measure passed yesterday is a good example of what I mean. The hawkish outrage in Congress is only triggered when the president entertains the possibility of taking troops out of harm's way. When he takes reckless and illegal action that puts them at risk, as he did when he ordered the illegal assassination of Soleimani, the same members that are crying foul today applauded the action. As Boland explains, the amendment passed by the committee yesterday sets so many conditions on withdrawal that it makes it all but impossible to satisfy them:

Crow's amendment adds several layers of policy goals to the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, which has already stretched on for 19 years and cost over a trillion dollars. As made clear in the Afghanistan Papers, most of these policy goals were never the original intention of the mission in Afghanistan, and were haphazardly added after the defeat of al Qaeda. With no clear vision for what achieving these fuzzy goals would look like, the mission stretches on indefinitely, an unarticulated victory unachievable.

The immediate Congressional response to a story that U.S. forces were being targeted is to make it much more difficult to pull them out of a war that cannot be won. Congressional hawks bemoan "micromanaging" presidential decisions and mock the idea of having "535 commanders-in-chief," but when it comes to prolonging pointless wars they are only too happy to meddle and tie the president's hands. When it comes to defending Congress' proper role in matters of war, these members are typically on the other side of the argument. They are content to let the president get us into as many wars as he might want, but they are horrified at the thought that any of those wars might one day be concluded. Yesterday's vote confirmed that there is an endless war caucus in the House, and it is bipartisan.

The original reporting of the bounty story is questionable for the reasons that Boland has pointed out before, but for the sake of argument let's assume that Russia has been offering bounties on U.S. troops in Afghanistan. When the U.S. keeps its troops at war in a country for almost twenty years, it is setting them up as targets for other governments. Just as the U.S. has armed and supported forces hostile to Russia and its clients in Syria, it should not come as a shock when they do to the same elsewhere. If Russia has been doing this, refusing to withdraw U.S. forces ensures that they will continue to have someone that they can target.

The longer that the U.S. stays at war in Afghanistan, the more incentives other states will have to make that continued presence more costly for the U.S. When the knee-jerk reaction in Washington to news of these bounties is to throw up obstacles to withdrawal, that gives other states another incentive to do more of this.

Because the current state of debate about Russia is so toxic and irrational, our political leaders seem incapable of responding carefully to Russian actions. It doesn't seem to occur to the war hawks that Russia might prefer that the U.S. remains preoccupied and tied down in Afghanistan indefinitely.

Prolonging our involvement in the war amounts to playing into Moscow's hands. For all of their posturing about security and strength, hard-liners routinely support destructive and irrational policies that redound to the advantage of other states. This is still happening with the war in Afghanistan, and if these hard-liners get their way it will continue happening for many years to come.

Daniel Larison is a senior editor at TAC , where he also keeps a solo blog . He has been published in the New York Times Book Review , Dallas Morning News , World Politics Review , Politico Magazine , Orthodox Life , Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week . He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter .

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kouroi a day ago

One needs to mention the democratic deficit in the US. All the members voting yes are representatives, they represent the people in their constituencies, and presumably vote for what the majority in those constituencies would want, or past promises.

Any poll shows that Americans would rather have the troops brought back home, thank you very much. But this is not what their representatives are voting for. Talk about democracy!

Fran Macadam a day ago

For elite war profiteers and the politicians they own, the only war that is lost is one that ends. No lives matter.

chris chuba a day ago

And what's the logic, if you make an accusation against someone you don't like it must be true. Okay well then let's drone strike Putin. If you are going to be Exceptional and consistent, Putin did everything Soleimani did so how can Liz Cotton argue for a different punishment?
1. Killed U.S. troops in a war zone, 2. planning attacks on U.S. troops.

The entire Russian military plans for attacks all the time just like ours does but the Neocons have declared that we are the only ones allowed to do that. Verdict, death penalty for Putin.

kouroi chris chuba a day ago

If you have watched Oliver Stone's interview with Putin, it comes through that in fact there were at least three or four attempts to Putin's life...

William Toffan chris chuba 21 hours ago

Death penalty for Putin = Death Penalty for continental USA.

RBH 15 hours ago

So you can get into a war without Congressional approval, but you can't get out of one without Congressional approval. Gotcha.

Lavinia 10 hours ago • edited

Interesting, well reasoned article as usual from Mr. Larison. However, I have to say that I don't see why Russia would want the US in Afghanistan indefinitely. In primis, they have a strategic partnership with China (even though we've got to see how Russia will behave now when there is the India-China rift), and China has been championing the idea of rebuilding the Silk Road (brilliant idea if you ask me) so in this sense it's more reasonable to assume that they might be aiming to get stability in the region rather than keep it in a state of unrest (as to be strategic partners you need to have some kind of common strategy, or at least not a completely different strategy). In 2018 they (Russia) actually were trying to organise a mediation process which would have the Afghan Gvt. and the Talibans discuss before the US would retire the troops, and it was very significative as they managed to get all the parties sitting around a table for the very first time (even the US participated as an observer).

Secondly, Russia also has pretty decent relations with Iran (at least according to Iranian press, which seems to be realistic as Russia is compliant to the JCPOA, is not aggressive towards them, and they're cooperating in the Astana process for a political solution for Syria, for example), and it wouldn't be so if Russia would pursue a policy which would aim to keep the US in the Middle East indefinitely, as Iran's WHOLE point is that they want the US out of the region, so if Russia would be trying to keep the US in the Middle East indefinitely, that would seriously upset Iran.

Thirdly, Russia is one of the founders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which now includes most of the states in Central Asia, China, India and Pakistan. The association never made overt statements about their stance on the US's presence in the region; yet they've been hinting that they don't approve of it, which is reasonable, as it is very likely that those countries would all have different plans for the region, which might include some consideration for human and economic development rather than constant and never-ending militarisation (of course Pakistan would be problematic here, as the funds for the Afghan warlords get channeled through Pakistan, which receives a lot of US money, so I don't know how they're managing this issue).

Last but not least, I cannot logically believe that the Talibans, who've been coherent in their message since the late 70's ("we will fight to the death until the invaders are defeated and out of our national soil") would now need to be "convinced" by the Russians to defeat and chase out the invader. This is just NOT believable at all. Afghanistan is called the Graveyard of Empires for a reason, I would argue.

In any case I am pleased to see that at TAC you have been starting debunking the Russia-narrative, as it is very problematic - most media just systematically misrepresents Russia in order to justify aggressive military action (Europe, specifically Northern Europe, is doing this literally CONSTANTLY, I'm so over it, really). The misrepresentation of Russia as an aggressive wannabe-empire is a cornerstone of the pro-war narrative, so it is imperative to get some actual realism into that.

wynn an hour ago • edited

As if the Afghan freedom fighters need additional incentive to eliminate the invaders? In case Amerikans don't know, Afghans, except those on the US payroll, intensely despise Amerika and its 'godless' ways. Amerikans forces have been sadistic, bombing Afghan weddings, funerals, etc.

Even if the Russians are providing bounties to the Afghans, to take out the invaders, don't the Amerikans remember the 80s when Washington (rightfully) supported the mujahedin with funds, arms, Stinger missiles, etc.? Again, the US is on shaky ground because of the neocons.

Afghanistan is known through the ages to be the graveyard of empires. They have done it on their own shedding blood, sweat, and tears. Also, the Afghan resistance have been principled about Amerikans getting out before making deals.

Blood Alcohol wynn an hour ago

Same argument goes for the Iraqi people.

[Jul 05, 2020] "Coddling these stupid brats." You'll get a kick out of reading this story. It's about Kelly Ann Conway's "woke" 15 year old daughter.

Jul 05, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Whoa Dammit , 13 minutes ago

We can't keep coddling these stupid brats. It's time to start making their parents pay for the mess and destruction that their ill raised offspring cause.

Finn McCool , 9 minutes ago

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8489983/Kellyanne-Conways-daughter-15-slams-parents-blocking-freedom-speech.html

"coddling these stupid brats." You'll get a kick out of reading this story. It's about Kelly Ann Conway's "woke" 15 year old daughter.

What a disaster. Pretty funny though.

ToWo , 12 minutes ago

Rerun

_arrow
Insert farm animal here , 13 minutes ago

100 percent, choose your side wisely now.

[Jul 03, 2020] Every American Should Watch Abby Martin's Afghanistan War Exposed- An Imperial Conspiracy

Jun 29, 2020 | www.mintpressnews.com

By MintPress News Desk

T he perpetual occupation of Afghanistan has become so normalized that it mostly serves as background noise to most Americans. It's even jokingly referred to as the "Forever War," accepted as just another constant reality. A soldier dies now and again, a couple of dozen civilians get killed in another bombing. It's never enough to stir the population to pressure Washington enough to stop it. And the endless war drags on.

From George W. Bush to Barack Obama, to Donald Trump, every U.S. president has promised to end the war. But their plans to bring the troops home inevitably require first sending more troops to the country. You can't look at all this rhetoric and reality and not conclude that the United States wants to stay in Afghanistan forever. And there is a reason, despite an unresolvable military quagmire, that the Empire won't let go of Afghanistan.

In this latest "Empire Files" documentary, journalist Abby Martin covers reveals the reality of America's Wars in Afghanistan, from the CIA construct of the 1980s through today's senseless stalemate. MintPress brings you documentary in its entirety, published with permission from filmmaker Abby Martin.

[Jul 03, 2020] The BLM-Antifa revolution under the cover of ending systemic racism is an anti-Trump movement controlled by the neoliberal elite through foundations, thinktanks, wealthy donors, and corporate donations; they are not interested in black population economic status and discrimination, only in return to power

Jul 03, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

The BLM-Antifa Marxist revolution under the cover of ending "systemic racism" is controlled by the ruling elite through foundations, progressive think tanks, wealthy liberals - and corporate CEOs you'd think know better.

Success depends on the help of opportunistic Democrat politicians who believe raising a clenched fist and parroting BLM will get them elected or re-elected, thus perpetuating a system of crony capitalism and endless war behind a kinder and gentler Democrat facade that is now falling away.

Gary Allen wrote in 1971:

If one understands that socialism is not a share-the-wealth program, but is in reality a method to consolidate and control the wealth, then the seeming paradox of superrich men promoting socialism becomes no paradox at all. Instead it becomes the logical, even the perfect tool of power-seeking megalomaniacs. Communism, or more accurately, socialism, is not a movement of the downtrodden masses, but of the economic elite.

The ruling elite, the financial class that has profited so mightily from riots and violence, will not allow Marxists and black hoodie nihilists to spawn a violent revolution.


Chocura750 , 4 minutes ago

I doubt very much that there is any significant ideological thinking in 99% of the BLM protestors. Imagine for a minute that George Floyd wasn't murdered, do you think that the BLM organizers could get 100 people to protest capitalism and rally for socialism.

ProsperD9 , 9 minutes ago

Looks like BLM is about to get canceled. They committed the biggest cardinal sin that can ever be committed on this earth. They can shoot all white babies, they can take over a nursing home and strangle all the old white people, they can paint the white house black...but one thing they CANNOT do... .drum roll please ...criticize IsraHell. Looks like they've done the deed and about to be canceled. Read about it BLACK LIVES MATTER 'CANCELED' AFTER CRITICIZING ISRAHELL.

HenryJonesJr , 20 minutes ago

More doom **** .... This kind of hyper-ventilating nonsense might sell well in highly urbanized, totally dependent regions of America, meaning cities. But the majority of Americans - white, black and brown - despise the idiotic Left and all their violence and insanity.

Economic Opportunity Cost

"You can't say civilization don't advance… in every war they kill you in a new way." – Will Rogers

Any doubt that the Military Industrial Complex is as strong as ever should be removed after examining Obama's 2012 Budget which has $900 billion dedicated to our military machine. We spent $370 billion in 2001, $620 billion in 2006, and now this liberal anti-war Democrat from Illinois is spending 45% more than that war monger Bush who was burned in effigy by the anti-war Democrats during Iraq War protests. It seems both parties are war pigs.

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, leaving the United States as the only remaining superpower on earth. Since 1990, the United States has depleted the U.S. Treasury of $11.5 trillion for spending on War. With no military on earth capable of challenging us why would there be a need to spend this much on the military? Over this same time frame the U.S. spent $500 billion on science, space & technology and $70 billion on energy, a mere 6% of the spending on invading sovereign countries. Military expenditures benefit humanity in no way. If these trillions had been invested by the private sector or devoted to energy and scientific research, our economy might not be a hollowed out shell, dependent on China for financing and oil exporting countries for energy. Neo-Cons argue the Arms Industry employs millions and benefits the country. These companies employ brilliant engineers and scientists who spend their days developing weapons that kill people more efficiently. If they had been employed manufacturing high tech goods to export around the world, inventing new technologies that didn't obliterate human beings, newer safer nuclear power plants, a more efficient electric grid, upgrading our deteriorating infrastructure, or finding a cure for Alzheimer's, would the United States be better off today?

The National Debt in 1990 was $3.2 trillion. Today, it is $15.7 trillion. This is a 500% increase in twenty-two years. What benefit has $11.5 trillion of spending on War produced for the United States or the world? In 2001, spending on Defense was 17% of total governmental spending. In 2012, Defense, Homeland Security, and war spending account for 25% of government spending. In the meantime, major cities experience blackouts due to an overloaded electrical grid, our 156,000 structurally deficient bridges crumble, one hundred year old water pipes burst under our streets every day, and we transfer over $300 billion per year to foreign countries for our precious oil. The 19 terrorist hijackers who implemented their plan with box cutters, spent less than $500,000 to pull off their 9/11 acts of terror – not war. The United States will directly spend at least $3 trillion on our wars of choice in response, while turning our country into a prison camp and stripping our citizens of their freedoms and liberties for perceived security and safety.

You would think we must be trying to keep up with our enemies by spending $900 billion per year on past and present military adventures. But one look at the following chart reveals the United States is spending almost as much as the rest of the world combined. The two countries considered potential rivals, China and Russia, spent $200 billion combined in 2010. This is 22% of U.S. spending. From a foreign viewpoint, one must wonder why the U.S. is spending such vast sums on our military. They can only conclude that it is for offensive intentions rather than defensive. The United States soil has not been attacked by a foreign power since December 7, 1941. Prior to that surprise attack, a foreign power hadn't attacked the U.S. since the War of 1812. With this stupendous level of wasteful spending, our leaders feel compelled to interfere in the business of sovereign states and dictate how they should govern their nations . When you have an enormous hammer, every country looks like a nail.

Laughably, the neo-con hawks and Fox News pundits declare that our military is a hollow shell and needs much greater funding to insure our safety from attack by our many enemies. Other countries, such as China and Russia, feel they have no choice but to increase their expenditures on the military. On a percentage basis, they have more than doubled their expenditures in the last ten years, and still are a drop in the ocean compared to American Empire spending. The fact is that the U.S., China and Russia all have enough nuclear weapons to obliterate the world – mutually assured destruction. The United States could realistically protect itself from attack with only the 18 ballistic missile nuclear submarines we have in commission.

When did Americans lose their ability to distinguish between intellectual and moral pygmies like George Bush, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney versus statesmen like Dwight D. Eisenhower? The Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war when our country was not threatened has proven to be financially and diplomatically disastrous and his blueprint is being followed by our Nobel Peace Prize President in his saber rattling with Iran. Following this policy puts them in fine company.

"Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. Frankly, I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing." -Dwight D. Eisenhower

The U.S. borrowed $807 billion from China, Japan and oil exporting countries to wage a war in Iraq that was based on false pretenses. None of the terrorist hijackers on 9/11 were Iraqis, they had no links to Al Qaeda, and Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Historian Barbara Tuchman description of "war as the unfolding of miscalculations" was never so fitting. In 2002, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld estimated the costs of the war in the range of $50 to $60 billion, a portion of which he believed would be financed by other countries. The United States invaded Iraq to secure the 115 billion barrels of oil reserves, pure and simple. We traded the blood of young Americans for oil because we chose to not develop a cohesive logical energy policy in the last 30 years. Americans, not in the military, sacrificed nothing in the last 11 years of war. We bought BMW SUVs, 6,000 square foot McMansions, flat screen HDTVs, iPads, iPhones and Rolexes while less than 1% of Americans fought and died, with the cost passed to future unborn generations. We are a country of chickenhawks, willing to sacrifice the few so the ruling class can comfortably relax on their decks sipping wine, believing Fox News propaganda about terrorists lurking behind every bush, and filling up their Mercedes convertibles for their excursions to the summer cottage in the Hamptons.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." – Dwight D. Eisenhower

As we spend $900 billion per year on instruments of destruction, 49 million Americans live in poverty, with 46 million on food stamps. There are 3 to 4 million people homeless in any given year. Military Veterans, who make up 13% of the population, account for 23% of the homeless. This is another example of Federal government politicians using young Americans to fulfill their agenda and then tossing them away like pieces of garbage. With the country supposedly three years into an economic recovery, tent cities of homeless dot the landscape across the nation. We pour billions into killing technology while millions of American families are forced to live in tents or sleep in their cars.

As the world spends $1.7 trillion per year on new methods of killing, millions die the old fashioned way.

What kind of a civilized society allocates 44% of the taxes taken from its people to war? Only 2.5% of your taxes go to science, energy, and environment. Only 2.2% of your taxes go to education and jobs. You produce the results that you would expect from your investments. A full 13% of our population doesn't have a high school diploma (20% of African Americans & 43% of Latinos) and only 30% have a college degree. How do we expect to lead the world in technology and research with these figures? We do lead the world in government issued student loan debt with $1 trillion and rising.

Human Cost

Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor

Time will tell on their power minds
Making war just for fun
Treating people just like pawns in chess
Wait till their judgment day comes, yeah!

Black Sabbath – War Pigs

George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Barack Obama are cowardly politicians who never had the "pleasure" of coming under fire in battle. The brilliant anti-war novel Catch-22 describes these men perfectly.

"Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three."

The world has been a huge game of Risk for these warmongers, with young Americans as the game pieces. Instead of conquering Kamchatka in a board game, these non-veterans sent 6,470 Americans to their deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan for a false cause. Their ideology of empire convinced them they could change the world into their image of how it should be, and their re-election campaigns were funded with millions from the purveyors of death – the arms industry.

"In modern war… you will die like a dog for no good reason." – Ernest Hemingway

Another 47,545 Americans have been badly wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. Three of these despicable politicians have written their memoirs, raking in millions for telling lies and half-truths. The 6,470 dead Americans won't have a chance to write their memoirs or get rich. They will never get a chance to see their kids' graduate college or walk their daughter down the aisle at her wedding. Their children will grow up with a giant hole in their hearts. Their widows will never recover from their endless heartache.

Politician chickenhawks who send our young people to their deaths for oil and ideology will receive their reward on judgment day if there is a just God.

As National Guard troops have been deployed over and over again to Iraq and Afghanistan, they must realize that Catch-22 is alive and well in today's military.

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle."

"That's some catch, that catch-22," he observed.

"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed

American soldiers, who have completed their duty to country, have been lied to and had the rules of the game changed again and again. Their politician leaders have reneged on their promises by sending men and women back to the war zone or not letting them come home on the timeline that was agreed to. Meanwhile, their families have gone bankrupt, lost their houses, and saw their marriages dissolve. Politicians started these wars and are too cowardly and prideful to accept failure.

"The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars." – General William Westmoreland

Over 1,300 more Americans died needlessly when Barack Obama, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, chose to double down in Afghanistan to prove he was as tough as Bush and McCain. Another man who has never been under fire needed to prove his manliness to his opponents and his constituency. He should have studied the words of former Presidents who were under fire.

"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity." - Dwight D. Eisenhower

"My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth." - George Washington

President Obama follows the standard Presidential game plan and dutifully gives patriotic speeches at military bases proclaiming the bravery and sacrifice of our troops. These are the words of politicians. The brutal reality for troops is much different. Representative Ron Paul in November 2003 described the early mistreatment of our soldiers:

The Humvees that soldiers were forced to drive did not have enough protective armor. In December 2004, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was giving one of his usual inspirational speeches when Army Spc. Thomas Wilson of the 278th Regimental Combat Team, a unit that consisted mainly of reservists from the Tennessee Army National Guard asked him a question:

"Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?"

This set off what the AP described as "a big cheer" from his comrades in arms. Rumsfeld paused, asked Wilson to repeat the question, then finally replied, "You go to war with the army you have." Besides, he added, "You can have all the armor in the world on a tank and it can be blown up." I'm glad Donald Rumsfeld has a clear conscience. History will not be kind to this despicable excuse for a human being.

Rumsfeld also sent Americans into battle without protective body armor. Only after bad publicity did the proper protection reach the troops. The blood of dead soldiers is on Rumsfeld's hands. While President Bush sacrificed by not golfing, terribly wounded soldiers were sent to Walter Reed Hospital to recover. Instead they entered hell on earth. Outpatient mistreatment was reported in 2004, but nothing was done. In 2004 and 2005, articles appeared in the Washington Post and in Salon interviewing First Lt. Julian Goodrum about his court martial for seeking medical care elsewhere due to poor conditions at WRAMC. A Washington Post expose in 2007 finally revealed the horrible mistreatment of our brave wounded soldiers. These reporters uncovered the following conditions:

There was a tremendous surge in suicides by soldiers who have been pushed beyond their limits as they increased by 80% between 2004 and 2008. There are almost as many deaths by suicide as deaths in combat:

Nearly 20% of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan - 300,000 in all - report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, yet only slightly more than half have sought treatment, according to a RAND Corporation report. Many service members said they do not seek treatment for psychological illnesses because they fear it will harm their careers. But even among those who do seek help for PTSD or major depression, only about half receive treatment that researchers consider "minimally adequate" for their illnesses. Recent studies expect PTSD to affect 30% of all returning veterans.

For all the glory and accolades of dying for chickenhawks like Dick Cheney, enlisted soldiers make between $17,000 and $32,000 per year. The military evidently does not prepare them well for the outside world as their unemployment rate is 12.1% versus the national rate of 8.2%. The pandering Obama gives speeches and the criminal bankers at JP Morgan have their PR maggots create TV commercials about hiring veterans, but the numbers don't lie. A country can be measured by how well it treats its veterans. Our leaders talk a good game, but their actions prove they don't care about the human costs of war. They are busy planning their next move in their game of Risk.

Moral Cost

Now in darkness, world stops turning
As the war machine keeps burning
No more war pigs of the power

Hand of God has struck the hour
Day of Judgment, God is calling
On their knees, the war pigs crawling
Begging mercy for their sins
Satan, laughing, spreads his wings
All right now!

Black Sabbath – War Pigs

Omar Bradley, the last five star General in the U.S. military, was known as the "soldier's general" during World War II. He was portrayed by Karl Malden in the movie Patton as a thoughtful man who cared about his troops. He was one of the key architects of the Normandy invasion and led the 12th Army Group consisting of 900,000 men until the end of the war. After the war, Bradley headed the Veterans Administration for two years. He is credited with doing much to improve its health care system and with helping veterans receive their educational benefits under the G.I. Bill of Rights. He ultimately rose to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Contrast the words of the fictional Colonel Kilgore from the movie Apocalypse Now, with the words of General Bradley:

Kilgore: I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like
[ sniffing, pondering ]
victory. Someday this war's gonna end…
[ suddenly walks off ]

"The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living." - Omar Bradley

We need giants like Omar Bradley and Dwight D. Eisenhower to lead our country through the difficult times ahead. These men knew the horrors of war and didn't act like it was a game of chess. Instead we will be led by intellectual and ethical infants, Obama or Romney. There are no wise men with a conscience and high moral standards in power today. Only those with no conscience and a willingness to lie are able to gain power in today's world. General Bradley understood that morality was ultimately more important than power and strength in determining the progress of a country. His words are those of someone who knew we had failed in our moral duty:

"We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount."

Peacemakers are ridiculed and shunned in America today. Those who preach diplomacy and non-interventionism, like Ron Paul, are scorned and ignored. Old men who care more about their own power than the human race are willing to sacrifice the blood of young people for precious oil, phony nationalism, their own strategic interests or corporate interests disguised as philosophical agendas. The world is a game for these old men. They care about their personal legacy and rigid ideologies. War and militarism are a failure of passion over reason. Albert Einstein, whose discovery brought about this age of potential world destruction, had no love for these blind warriors.

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice."

The overwhelming cost of maintaining a global empire eventually bankrupted Rome and Great Britain. Treasures were wasted, young men were needlessly sacrificed in the name of the flag, and the morality of leaders sank to unprecedented levels. The U.S. had advanced financially and technologically for more than a century, but since the takeover of our economic system by private banking and corporate interests in 1913 we have seen continuous war, continuous currency debasement, and continuous moral decay. How far will we decline before a sufficient number of Americans are outraged enough to lead a new American Revolution?

Our current situation reminds me of the movie Planet of the Apes. The apes are divided into a strict class system: the gorillas as police, military, and hunters; the orangutans as administrators, politicians and lawyers; and the chimpanzees as intellectuals and scientists. Humans, who cannot talk, are considered feral vermin and are hunted and used for scientific experimentation. The United States is now in the control of gorillas and orangutans. If we continue down the current path of financial and moral decay, allowing the Military Industrial Complex, criminal bankers and corrupt politicians to push us into further world conflicts, we will experience the shock and horror that George Taylor, played by Charlton Heston, displayed in the final scene of Planet of the Apes .

George Taylor: Oh my God. I'm back. I'm home. All the time, it was… We finally really did it.

[ screaming ]

You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!

The War Pigs must be stopped before it's too late. The Military Industrial Complex, with the unwavering support of central bankers printing unlimited amounts of fiat currency, while controlling the scoundrel puppets in Washington DC, will destroy this country in their never ending quest for power and profits. One man fights a lonely battle against these forces of oppression. We must join his legion and take this country back from the war pigs.

"As many frustrated Americans who have joined the Tea Party realize, we cannot stand against big government at home while supporting it abroad. We cannot talk about fiscal responsibility while spending trillions on occupying and bullying the rest of the world. We cannot talk about the budget deficit and spiraling domestic spending without looking at the costs of maintaining an American empire of more than 700 military bases in more than 120 foreign countries. We cannot pat ourselves on the back for cutting a few thousand dollars from a nature preserve or an inner-city swimming pool at home while turning a blind eye to a Pentagon budget that nearly equals those of the rest of the world combined." Ron Paul

[Nov 26, 2011] The Passing of the Postwar Era By Andrew Bacevich

"Washington took the "Soviet path"-pouring American treasure into the military, war, and national security-and so helped drive their country off the nearest cliff."
Nov 26, 2011 | TomDispatch

In every aspect of human existence, change is a constant. Yet change that actually matters occurs only rarely. Even then, except in retrospect, genuinely transformative change is difficult to identify. By attributing cosmic significance to every novelty and declaring every unexpected event a revolution, self-assigned interpreters of the contemporary scene - politicians and pundits above all - exacerbate the problem of distinguishing between the trivial and the non-trivial.

Did 9/11 "change everything"? For a brief period after September 2001, the answer to that question seemed self-evident: of course it did, with massive and irrevocable implications. A mere decade later, the verdict appears less clear. Today, the vast majority of

Americans live their lives as if the events of 9/11 had never occurred. When it comes to leaving a mark on the American way of life, the likes of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg have long since eclipsed Osama bin Laden. (Whether the legacies of Jobs and Zuckerberg will prove other than transitory also remains to be seen.)

Anyone claiming to divine the existence of genuinely Big Change Happening Now should, therefore, do so with a sense of modesty and circumspection, recognizing the possibility that unfolding events may reveal a different story.

All that said, the present moment is arguably one in which the international order is, in fact, undergoing a fundamental transformation. The "postwar world" brought into existence as a consequence of World War II is coming to an end. A major redistribution of global power is underway. Arrangements that once conferred immense prerogatives upon the United States, hugely benefiting the American people, are coming undone.

In Washington, meanwhile, a hidebound governing class pretends that none of this is happening, stubbornly insisting that it's still 1945 with the so-called American Century destined to continue for several centuries more (reflecting, of course, God's express intentions).

Here lies the most disturbing aspect of contemporary American politics, worse even than rampant dysfunction borne of petty partisanship or corruption expressed in the buying and selling of influence. Confronted with evidence of a radically changing environment, those holding (or aspiring to) positions of influence simply turn a blind eye, refusing even to begin to adjust to a new reality.

Big change happening now

The Big Change happening before our very eyes is political, economic, and military. At least four converging vectors are involved.

First, the Collapse of the Freedom Agenda: In the wake of 9/11, the administration of George W Bush set out to remake the Greater Middle East. This was the ultimate strategic objective of Bush's "global war on terror".

Intent on accomplishing across the Islamic world what he believed the United States had accomplished in Europe and the Pacific between 1941 and 1945, Bush sought to erect a new order conducive to US interests - one that would permit unhindered access to oil and other resources, dry up the sources of violent Islamic radicalism, and (not incidentally) allow Israel a free hand in the region. Key to the success of this effort would be the US military, which Bush (and many ordinary Americans) believed to be unstoppable and invincible - able to beat anyone anywhere under any conditions.

Alas, once implemented, the Freedom Agenda almost immediately foundered in Iraq. The Bush administration had expected Operation Iraqi Freedom to be a short, tidy war with a decisively triumphant outcome. In the event, it turned out to be a long, dirty (and very costly) war yielding, at best, exceedingly ambiguous results.

Well before he left office in January 2009, Bush himself had abandoned his Freedom Agenda, albeit without acknowledging its collapse and therefore without instructing Americans on the implications of that failure. One specific implication stands out: we now know that US military power, however imposing, falls well short of enabling the United States to impose its will on the Greater Middle East. We can neither liberate nor dominate nor tame the Islamic world, a verdict from the Bush era that Present Barack Obama's continuing misadventures in "AfPak" have only served to affirm.

Trying harder won't produce a different result. Outgoing secretary of defense Robert Gates caught the new reality best: "Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it."

To be sure, Freedom Agenda dead-enders - frequently found under K in your phone book - continue to argue otherwise. Even now, for example, Kagans, Keanes, Krauthammers and Kristols are insisting that "we won" the Iraq War - or at least had done so until Obama fecklessly flung away a victory so gloriously gained. Essential to their argument is that no one notices how they have progressively lowered the bar in defining victory.

Back in 2003, they were touting Saddam Hussein's overthrow as just the beginning of American domination of the Middle East. While Saddam's departure was said to have "made the world a better place," today, just getting out of Baghdad with US forces intact has become the operative definition of success, ostensibly vindicating the many thousands killed and maimed, millions of refugees displaced, and trillions of dollars expended.

Meanwhile, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia remains in the field, conducting some 30 attacks per week against Iraqi security forces and civilians. This we are expected not to notice. Some victory.

Second, the Great Recession: In the history of the American political economy, the bursting of speculative bubbles forms a recurring theme. Wall Street shenanigans that leave the plain folk footing the bill are an oft-told tale. Recessions of one size or another occur at least once a decade.

Yet the economic downturn that began in 2008 stands apart, distinguished by its severity, duration, and resistance to even the most vigorous (or extravagant) remedial action. In this sense, rather than resembling any of the garden-variety economic slumps or panics of the past half-century, the Great Recession of our own day recalls the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Instead of being a transitory phenomenon, it seemingly signifies something transformational. The Great Recession may well have inaugurated a new era - its length indeterminate but likely to stretch for many years - of low growth, high unemployment, and shrinking opportunity. As incomes stagnate and more and more youngsters complete their education only to find no jobs waiting, members of the middle class are beginning to realize that the myth of America as a classless society is just that. In truth, the game is rigged to benefit the few at the expense of the many - and in recent years, the fixing has become ever more shamelessly blatant.

This realization is rattling American politics. In just a handful of years, confidence in the Washington establishment has declined precipitously. Congress has become a laughing stock. The high hopes raised by Obama's election have long since dissipated, leaving disappointment and cynicism in their wake.

One result, on both the far right and the far left, has been to stoke the long-banked fires of American radicalism. The energy in American politics today lies with the Tea Party Movement and Occupy Wall Street, both expressing a deep-seated antipathy toward the old way of doing things. Populism is making one of its periodic appearances on the American scene.

Where this will lead remains, at present, unclear. But ours has long been a political system based on expectations of ever-increasing material abundance, promising more for everyone. Whether that system can successfully deal with the challenges of managing scarcity and distributing sacrifice ranks as an open question. This is especially true when those among us who have been making out like bandits profess so little willingness to share in any sacrifices that may be required.

Third, the Arab Spring: As with the floundering American economy, so with Middle Eastern politics: predicting the future is a proposition fraught with risk. Yet without pretending to forecast outcomes - Will Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya embrace democracy? Can Islamic movements coexist with secularized modernity? this much can be safely said: the ongoing Arab upheaval is sweeping from that region of the world the last vestiges of Western imperialism.

Europeans created the modern Middle East with a single purpose in mind: to serve European interests. With the waning of European power in the wake of World War II, the United States - gingerly at first, but by the 1980s without noticeable inhibition - stepped in to fill the void. What had previously been largely a British sphere now became largely an American one, with the ever-accelerating tempo of US military activism testifying to that fact.

Although Washington abjured the overt colonialism once practiced in London, its policies did not differ materially from those that Europeans had pursued. The idea was to keep a lid on things, exclude mischief-makers, and at the same time extract from the Middle East whatever it had on offer. The preferred American MO

Dilbert was to align with authoritarian regimes, offering arms, security guarantees, and other blandishments in return for promises of behavior consistent with Washington's preferences. Concern for the wellbeing of peoples living in the region (Israelis excepted) never figured as more than an afterthought.

What events of the past year have made evident is this: that lid is now off and there is little the United States (or anyone else) can do to reinstall it. A great exercise in Arab self-determination has begun. Arabs (and, arguably, non-Arabs in the broader Muslim world as well) will decide their own future in their own way. What they decide may be wise or foolish. Regardless, the United States and other Western nations will have little alternative but to accept the outcome and deal with the consequences, whatever they happen to be.

A Washington inhabited by people certain that decisions made in the White House determine the course of history will insist otherwise, of course. Democrats credit Obama's 2009 Cairo speech with inspiring Arabs to throw off their chains. Even more laughably, Republicans credit George W Bush's "liberation" of Iraq for installing democracy in the region and supposedly moving Tunisians, Egyptians, and others to follow suit.

To put it mildly, evidence to support such claims simply does not exist. One might as well attribute the Arab uprising to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Those expecting Egyptians to erect statues of Obama or Bush in Cairo's Tahrir Square are likely to have a long wait.

Fourth, Beleaguered Europe's Quest for a Lifeline: To a considerable extent, the story of the 20th century - at least the commonly-told Western version of that story - is one of Europe screwing up and America coming to the rescue. The really big screw-ups were, of course, the two world wars. In 1917 and again after December 1941, the United States sent large armies to deal with those who had disturbed the peace. After the first war, the Americans left. After the second, they stayed, not only providing soldiers to safeguard Western Europe, but also rejuvenating the shattered economies of the European democracies.

Even with the passing of a half-century, the Marshall Plan stands out as a singular example of enlightened statecraft - and also as a testimonial to America's unsurpassed economic capacity following World War II. Saving continents in dire distress was a job that only the United States could accomplish.

That was then. Today, Europe has once again screwed up, although fortunately this time there is no need for foreign armies to sort out the mess. The crisis of the moment is an economic one, due entirely to European recklessness and irresponsibility (not qualitatively different from the behavior underlying the American economic crisis).

Will Uncle Sam once again ride to the rescue? Not a chance. Beset with the problems that come with old age, Uncle Sam can't even mount up. To whom, then, can Europe turn for assistance? Recent headlines tell the story: "Cash-Strapped Europe Looks to China For Help" "Europe Begs China for Bailout" "EU takes begging bowl to Beijing" "Is China the Bailout Saviour in the European Debt Crisis?" The crucial issue here isn't whether Beijing will actually pull Europe's bacon out of the fire. Rather it's the shifting expectations underlying the moment. After all, hasn't the role of European savior already been assigned? Isn't it supposed to be Washington's in perpetuity? Apparently not.

Back to the future In the words of the old Buffalo Springfield song: "Something's happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear."

American politicians stubbornly beg to differ, of course, content to recite vapid but reassuring cliches about American global leadership, American exceptionalism, and that never-ending American Century. Everything, they would have us believe, will remain just as it has been - providing the electorate installs the right person in the Oval Office.

"To those nations who continue to resist the unstoppable march of human, political and economic freedom," declares Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, "we will make clear that they are on the wrong side of history, by ensuring that America's light shines bright in every corner of the globe, representing a beacon of hope and inspiration."

"This is America's moment," insists Mitt Romney. "We should embrace the challenge, not shrink from it, not crawl into an isolationist shell, not wave the white flag of surrender, nor give in to those who assert America's time has passed ... I will not surrender America's role in the world." With an unsurprising absence of originality, the title of Romney's campaign "white paper" on national security is "An American Century".

Governor Rick Perry's campaign web site offers this important insight: "Rick Perry believes in American exceptionalism, and rejects the notion our president should apologize for our country but instead believes allies and adversaries alike must know that America seeks peace from a position of strength."

For his part, Newt Gingrich wants it known that "America is still the last, best hope of mankind on earth."

The other Republican candidates (Ron Paul always excepted) draw from the same shallow and stagnant pool of ideas. To judge by what we might call the C Wright Mills standard of leadership - "men without lively imagination are needed to execute policies without imagination devised by an elite without imagination" - all are eminently qualified for the presidency. Nothing is wrong with America or the world, they would have us believe, that can't be fixed by ousting Obama from office, thereby restoring the rightful order of things.

"Is America Over?" That question adorns the cover of the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, premier organ of the foreign policy establishment. As is typically the case with that establishment, Foreign Affairs is posing the wrong question, one designed chiefly to elicit a misleading, if broadly reassuring answer.

Proclaim it from the rooftops: No, America is not "over". Yet a growing accumulation of evidence suggests that America today is not the America of 1945. Nor does the international order of the present moment bear more than a passing resemblance to that which existed in the heyday of American power. Everyone else on the planet understands this. Perhaps it's finally time for Americans - starting with American politicians - to do so as well. Should they refuse, a painful comeuppance awaits.

Andrew J Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author, among other works, of Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War and the editor of The Short American Century: A Postmortem, forthcoming from Harvard University Press. To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Bacevich discusses how his students have come to accept perpetual American war as normalcy click here, or download it to your iPod here.

(Copyright 2011 Andrew Bacevich.)

Solving for X On George F. Kennan

Andrew J. Bacevich | October 25, 2011

For students of twentieth-century American statecraft, George Kennan has long ranked as an intriguing figure, second in that respect only to Henry Kissinger. But unlike Kissinger, who served as both national security adviser and secretary of state (for a time holding both offices simultaneously), Kennan never occupied a top-tier position. A career diplomat who never actually dictated policy, he provided a rationale or framework for those who did. As Kissinger once wrote, "Kennan came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history." Yet power resides not with the author of a doctrine but with those who order its transformation into policy and then control its implementation. This Kennan never did.

Very much like Kissinger, however, Kennan continued to cast a long shadow for decades after his nominal departure from public life. He remained a presence. What he said and wrote mattered-or at least seemed to. The Kennan mystique derives less from the imprint he left on policy than from the elusiveness of his outlook and character. When it came to expressing his views, Kennan was never one to hesitate. He wrote compulsively. Over the course of a long life-he died in 2005 at age 101-he left behind an enormous paper trail, consisting of official documents, Congressional testimony, lectures, essays, well over a dozen books (including his two-volume memoirs), letters, diaries and even poetry. Kennan the poet will never rank alongside Robert Lowell or William Carlos Williams. As a prose stylist, however, he could display an almost ethereal grace, which either explains or makes more mystifying his perpetual complaint about others never quite grasping what he meant. Throughout his life, he remained-and almost certainly wished to remain-difficult to label or to pin down.

John Lewis Gaddis's achievement in this comprehensive official biography is to unwrap the Kennan enigma. Enjoying unprecedented access to all Kennan's papers, having interviewed Kennan and members of his family, Gaddis has taken the measure of his man. Yet even while insisting resolutely on his subject's claim to greatness, Gaddis succeeds chiefly in revealing Kennan's frailties and foibles. The man in full turns out to have been all too human.

Born in Milwaukee in 1904-his mother died shortly after his birth-Kennan grew up in a strait-laced middle-class household where propriety took precedence over affection. After graduating from a nearby military high school, he enrolled at Princeton, where he demonstrated an aptitude for history while also immersing himself in contemporary American fiction, with fellow Princetonian F. Scott Fitzgerald being a particular favorite. The Great Gatsby, he later recalled, "went right into me and became part of me." In his memoirs, Kennan portrays his college years as a melancholy period of isolation and loneliness. Gaddis demonstrates that the truth was otherwise: Kennan enjoyed himself at Princeton, cheering for the football team, playing in dance bands and participating as an upperclassman in the ritual hazing of first-year students.

A summer spent rambling through Europe with a college chum convinced Kennan, at loose ends regarding his future, that diplomacy might provide a suitable career. Upon graduation from Princeton in 1925, he successfully applied for a position in the newly created Foreign Service. After a diplomatic apprenticeship in Geneva and Hamburg, he jumped at a State Department offer to train as a Soviet specialist-this at a time when the United States had no diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. It was a life-altering decision. Kennan became a Russophile, with an abiding fondness for Chekhov.

His affinity for Russian culture and admiration for the Russian people were matched only by his loathing of the Soviet system, which he encountered firsthand in 1933. With commercial considerations uppermost in mind, the newly elected president, Franklin Roosevelt, decided that year to restore relations with the Kremlin, appointing William Bullitt as US ambassador. The State Department posted Kennan to Bullitt's staff and charged him with reopening the US embassy in Moscow, closed since the Bolshevik Revolution. Kennan remained in Moscow until 1936, having by then long since concluded that anyone expecting a "friendly" Soviet-American relationship to bloom was simply naïve.

Assignments to Prague, Berlin (he was interned for five months after Germany declared war on the United States in December 1941) and Lisbon followed. By 1944 he was back in Moscow, serving as right-hand man to Ambassador W. Averell Harriman. Courtesy of Hitler, the United States and the Soviet Union were now allies of a kind. Yet Kennan's second posting in Moscow did nothing to improve his opinion of the Soviet system.

* * *

The Soviet-American alliance did not survive the collapse of Hitler's Reich. And in February 1946, with US officials already gripped by an increasingly anti-Soviet mood, Kennan-chargé d'affaires during Harriman's temporary absence-sent Washington the most influential cable ever drafted by a career diplomat. According to Gaddis, a leading scholar of the cold war who teaches at Yale, the so-called Long Telegram-more than 5,000 words in all-was "the geopolitical equivalent of a medical X-ray, penetrating beneath alarming symptoms to yield at first clarity, then comprehension, and finally by implication a course of treatment."

Yet as in business or entertainment or politics, so too in statecraft: timing is everything. In this instance, Kennan's was exquisite. "Here was a case where nothing but the whole truth would do," he wrote in his memoirs. "They had asked for it. Now, by God, they would have it." Mustering all the assurance acquired during the years spent studying and dealing with the Soviet government, he unleashed a thunderbolt. Further efforts to get along with the Kremlin were pointless. Soviet ambitions and US interests were irreconcilable. Protecting those interests required a radically new approach-a sustained and comprehensive effort to prevent any further expansion of Soviet power. Over time-not likely to be very long in Kennan's estimation-such a strategy of containment would cause the Soviet Union to collapse from within.

As an exercise in expository writing, Kennan later remarked, the Long Telegram resembled "one of those primers put out by alarmed congressional committees or by the Daughters of the American Revolution, designed to arouse the citizenry to the dangers of the Communist conspiracy." He wasn't exaggerating. Kennan classified the Soviet leadership as "neurotic" and the Soviet system as "archaic in form, fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries." Whatever the accuracy of this assessment, in policy circles it elicited an enthusiastically positive response. Kennan's missive, Gaddis acknowledges, served in effect to "provide the rationale for the course upon which the [Truman] administration had already embarked."

In an instant, Kennan's reputation was made. Summoned back to Washington, he soon became director of policy planning, a position created by Secretary of State George Marshall to address questions of basic strategy. As the go-to guy on all matters related to the Soviet Union, Kennan bent himself to the task of converting containment from concept to policy. Out of the ensuing period of intense activity came all manner of large initiatives: the Marshall Plan, NATO and early experiments with covert dirty tricks, some succeeding (funneling money to anti-communist Italian political parties, for example), others failing abysmally (attempting to subvert the Kremlin-aligned government of Albania). In each of these episodes and more, Kennan was in the thick of things.

Not least of all, an essay called "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," the handiwork of a mysterious "X," appeared in the Summer 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, instantly becoming a must-read for anyone with the slightest interest in public policy: here was the definitive explanation of why the USSR behaved as it did and how the United States needed to respond, the essential themes of the Long Telegram repackaged for public consumption. The roughly five minutes it took enterprising journalists to identify Kennan as the essay's author catapulted him from influential insider to intellectual celebrity. In the world of ideas, doors swung open. Publishers, editors, columnists, the presidents of universities and foundations: everyone wanted a piece of Mr. X.

* * *

All of which thrust the subject of this sudden adulation into a deep funk. Although intensely ambitious and hungry for recognition, Kennan found it almost impossible to derive lasting satisfaction from any of his achievements. Morose and self-absorbed, he instinctively responded to any perceived slight or setback by being sorry for himself. Feelings of inadequacy and guilt (periodic marital infidelity evoked acute qualms of conscience) found expression in bouts of illness, real or imagined, that landed him in the hospital or confined him to bed, keeping him hors de combat for weeks on end.

Complementing this tendency to moodiness was Kennan's relentlessly negative assessment of his country and countrymen. He disdained American culture as shallow and materialistic. He derided the political system, especially the deference accorded the unwashed masses by vote-grubbing office-seekers. "I hate democracy," he complained in a letter to his sister. "I hate the press…; I hate the 'peepul.'" That was in the 1930s. By the '50s Kennan professed that "for my own country, I have not a shred of hope, not one." By the '80s he was describing the United States as "a wasteland, a garbage dump, a sewer." "The America I know and love and owe allegiance to," he once wrote, was the America "of John Hay and Henry Adams and [Theodore] Roosevelt"-that is, an America that had long since ceased to exist. In Kennan's America, an "enlightened and responsible" elite would wield political authority, with the right to vote restricted to those possessing the proper "character, education, and inclination," criteria intended to exclude blacks, most women and all city-dwelling Jews and Catholics recently arrived from Eastern or Southern Europe. This was elitism laced with bigotry and seasoned with a hint of authoritarianism.

Kennan, in other words, was a man distinctly at odds with the times (not to mention the culture) into which he had been born. As a consequence, Gaddis observes, he was "allergic to orthodoxy"-even (or especially) any orthodoxy he had played a hand in promulgating. No sooner had a strategy that Kennan was credited with devising become dogma than he commenced to pick it apart.

With its this-far-and-no-further premise, for example, containment necessarily meant that a Germany divided between East and West by the outcome of World War II should remain divided for the foreseeable future. Yet as early as 1949, Kennan was advocating withdrawal of all occupation forces to permit the reunification of a neutralized Germany, a prospect equally unacceptable to the Kremlin, America's European allies and even most Germans. Containment's us-against-them logic lumped together all communists as adversaries, unless proven otherwise. Yet in the immediate wake of Mao Zedong's victory in China's civil war, Kennan urged that the Truman administration act with "resolution, speed, ruthlessness, and self-assurance" to oust 300,000 Kuomintang troops from Taiwan "the way that Theodore Roosevelt might have done it." State Department colleagues must have thought he'd taken leave of his senses; after submitting the proposal, Kennan withdrew it the same day.

As if perversely intent on soiling his own nest, the father of containment transformed himself into an archcritic of containment, which inevitably limited his further utility in policy-making circles. To Kennan's considerable distress, he soon found that his views no longer commanded automatic attention. His renown remained intact, but his influence waned. Eased out of policy planning in late 1949, he never again wielded significant clout, although for years he nursed increasingly improbable hopes of being invited back to redeem American statecraft.

Kennan's appointment as US ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1951, therefore, came as a sort of consolation prize. But this third tour in Moscow proved if anything more frustrating than the previous two. Stalin couldn't be bothered to see him, which Kennan took to be a calculated affront. Feeling isolated and besieged, he had the CIA provide him with cyanide vials in case the need to commit suicide should arise. Less than a year into his assignment, talking to reporters while on a visit to Berlin, the ambassador compared living conditions in Moscow to his internment in Hitler's Germany. When Kennan's comments made the newspapers, the Soviets promptly declared him persona non grata. Gaddis suggests that Kennan's gaffe was intentional, the most efficient way of arranging an exit and getting back to Washington, where the newly elected President Eisenhower might anoint him under secretary of state. But with the doctrinaire John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's choice to head the State Department, deeming Kennan insufficiently hawkish, no such appointment was in the cards. Apart from his brief service as President Kennedy's ambassador to Yugoslavia, Kennan's direct involvement in policy-making had all but ended.

* * *

Yet a new career almost immediately commenced. Batting aside offers from various A-list universities bidding for his services, Kennan accepted J. Robert Oppenheimer's invitation to join the Institute for Advanced Study, at Princeton. This remained Kennan's base for the rest of his active life, nearly a half-century devoted to writing diplomatic history and darkly expounding on the issues of the day.

Kennan became a one-man Greek chorus, denouncing the crassness of American culture, lamenting the degradation of the environment and warning against the impending threat of nuclear apocalypse. His views enjoyed wide dissemination and always received a respectful hearing-before being promptly discarded. He was, in short, the embodiment of the public intellectual, "a mystic and a visionary," according to Isaiah Berlin, at a time when Washington belonged to functionaries who knew the assigned script by heart and could be counted on to recite their lines.

As with other mystics and visionaries, Kennan could be unpredictable and even erratic. His proposed response to the 1968 Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, for example, was to reinforce the US garrison in West Germany with another 100,000 troops. Yet in 1973 he insisted that Washington refrain even from expressing sympathy for Soviet dissidents like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov so as to avoid upsetting the Kremlin. The 1975 Helsinki Accords elicited sharp disapproval: "two years of wrangling over language…one of it committing anyone specifically to anything." And when revolutionaries in 1979 seized the US embassy in Tehran, he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that "the United States should simply declare war on Iran."

None of these dubious judgments disrupted the flow of awards and recognition that Kennan steadily accumulated: two Pulitzers, two National Book Awards, the Bancroft and Francis Parkman prizes for history, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal, the Albert Einstein Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, more than two dozen honorary degrees-just about every trinket on offer apart from a Super Bowl ring.

All the while, Kennan lamented that his life had come to nothing, venting his unhappiness in his diary. "I have nothing to live for," he complained soon after his formal retirement from government employment. "I am an exile wherever I go." Or this: "I am utterly without relationship to this country and this age." Or again: "I am determined that if I cannot have all, or the greater part, of what I want, no one is going to deprive me of the glorious martyrdom of having none of it." Kennan wallowed in self-pity. "My role," he wrote on another occasion, is "that of a prophet."

It was for this that I was born. And my tragedy is to enact this part at a time when it becomes increasingly doubtful that there will, as little as ten or twenty years hence, be anyone left to recognize the validity of the prophecies, or whether, indeed any record of these prophecies will have survived….

Gaddis describes Kennan's diary as "the most remarkable work of sustained self-analysis-and certainly self-criticism-since The Education of Henry Adams." Based on the extracts reprinted in the book, the comparison seems misplaced. Unlike Kennan, Adams experienced significant personal tragedy (for one, his wife committed suicide). He also evinced a far more acute appreciation of the problems following in the wake of modernity, not least the moral confusion to which the advent of the machine age was giving rise. Adams possessed in abundance one quality that Kennan lacked altogether: a sense of humor. And, blessedly, Adams was not a whiner.

* * *

In his conclusion, Gaddis ranks Kennan among the great Americans of the twentieth century, locating that greatness in his "timeless, transcendent teaching." This is an odd judgment, not easily sustained by the evidence that Gaddis has compiled in this fat book. In fact, Kennan's "teaching"-if by that word we mean the public expression of his views-was all over the map, as likely to be informed by overstatement or ill temper as by wisdom and foresight.

Like many intellectuals, Kennan did best when confining himself to generalities: "We must be gardeners and not mechanics in our approach to world affairs." In his education George W. Bush apparently overlooked that particular Kennanesque nugget, for which Americans have ample cause for regret. The Kennan oeuvre contains other aphorisms that would do Jeremiah proud: "Providence has a way of punishing those who persist long and willfully in ignoring great realities." With Washington today willfully ignoring realities at home and abroad, that one stings.

Yet great teachers do not compromise truth. This Kennan did when promoting views to which he happened (if only in passing) to subscribe. One of his most memorable sentences comes at the conclusion of "The Source of Soviet Conduct." After suggesting that the "thoughtful observer" should "find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin's challenge to American society," Kennan offered this peroration:

He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.

This patently dishonest curtsy to American exceptionalism was violently at odds with what Kennan believed. Indeed, a few short years before, a letter to his sister included a rather different assessment of the United States: "Ignorant and conceited, we now enter blindly on a future with which we are quite unqualified to cope." In the essay that made him famous, Kennan engaged in blatant pandering, suppressing his almost comically low opinion of his countrymen. Mr. X's aim was not to educate or enlighten but to manipulate and sell. The sales job worked, of course, setting an example mimicked ever since by the demagogues who routinely cite history's purposes and America's supposedly special calling to promote US meddling in some far quarter of the globe. No wonder Kennan subsequently had occasion to regret his words.

Rather than a great man (does such a creature exist?), Kennan exemplifies the fate and the misfortune of someone an inscrutable Providence briefly smiles on and then just as quickly casts aside. Gaddis includes this observation by Bismarck: "By himself the individual can create nothing; he can only wait until he hears God's footsteps resounding through events and then spring forward to grasp the hem of his mantle-that is all." For a brief interval after World War II, Kennan faintly detected God's footsteps and ever so briefly became history's foot servant. Yet that moment soon passed, leaving the gloomy Kennan to spend the remainder of his life vainly trying to recapture it.

We're Number One (in Self-Promotion) TomDispatch by William Astore

January 6, 2011 | Tomgram

Can you believe that, in certain circles, support for obesity is becoming an American birthright (as in "the freedom to be…") and a political position? Like various radio and TV shock jocks, Sarah Palin has been attacking Michelle Obama's anti-obesity initiative as yet another example of "the nanny state run amok." (It's enough to make you hyperventilate on the couch while watching "Law and Order" reruns!) Meanwhile, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell let loose a blast at the National Football League for postponing a Philadelphia-Minnesota game because of an upcoming blizzard. "We're becoming a nation of wussies," he thundered. (It's enough to make you text and tweet up a storm from that same couch!)

A question arises: Doesn't anybody have anything better to do? I mean, aren't there a few more salient problems to attack in our American world, like the decline and fall of just about everything? Take the U.S. military, about which -- as TomDispatch regular and retired Lieutenant Colonel William Astore points out -- American presidents (and the rest of our political crew) can never say enough hyperbolically praiseworthy things. Well, bad times are supposed to be great for military recruitment. But even if a flood of gays and lesbians sign on as soon as Do-Ask-I'll-Tell becomes official policy, there are other long-term impediments to producing an effective fighting force.

In April 2010, for instance, a group of retired top brass and others released a report claiming that 27% of Americans between 17 and 24 are "too fat to fight." "Within just 10 years, the number of states reporting that 40 percent of their 18- to 24-year-olds are obese or overweight went from one [Kentucky] to 39." No reason to focus on that, though. After all, it was so last year.

Just as the year ended, however, the Education Trust issued a report indicating that nearly a quarter of all applicants to the Armed Forces, despite having a high-school diploma, can't pass the necessary military entrance exam. This isn't Rhodes Scholarships we're talking about, but not having "the reading, mathematics, science, and problem-solving abilities" to become a bona fide private in the U.S. Army. We're talking the sort of basic that, according to an Education Trust spokesperson, makes it "equally likely that the men and women who don't pass the test are [also] unprepared for the civilian workforce."

Last month, as if to emphasize the seriousness of the problem, Shanghai's students came in number one in the Program for International Student Assessment, a well-respected test given to 15-year-old students in 65 countries in reading, science, and math skills. U.S. students came in a glorious 17th in reading, 23rd in math, and 31st in science. In today's dispatch, Astore asks whether the U.S. military is actually "the finest fighting force in the history of the world." Then there's that other question: These days, can anyone call the United States the finest nation in the world with a straight face? The fattest? Maybe, though we're behind various Pacific island nations for that honor. The least well educated? Not yet, but heading that way. Maybe it's time for Congress to launch a No-Nation-Left-Behind program -- for us. Think about it while you're eating those s'mores Sarah Palin is plugging. (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview in which Astore discusses the military nightmares of a fading empire, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.) Tom

Freedom Fighters for a Fading Empire
What It Means When We Say We Have the World's Finest Fighting Force
By William J. Astore

Words matter, as candidate Barack Obama said in the 2008 election campaign. What to make, then, of President Obama's pep talk last month to U.S. troops in Afghanistan in which he lauded them as "the finest fighting force that the world has ever known"? Certainly, he knew that those words would resonate with the troops as well as with the folks back home.

In fact, this sort of description of the U.S. military has become something of a must for American presidents. Obama's predecessor George W. Bush, for example, boasted of that military as alternately "the greatest force for freedom in the history of the world" and "the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known." Hyperbolic and self-promoting statements, to be sure, but undoubtedly sincere, reflecting as they do an American sense of exceptionalism that sits poorly with the increasingly interconnected world of the twenty-first century.

I'm a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a historian who teaches military history. The retired officer in me warms to the sentiment of our troops as both unparalleled fighters and selfless liberators, but the historian in me begs to differ.

Let's start with the fighting part of the equation. Are we truly the world's greatest fighting force, not only at this moment, but as measured against all militaries across history? If so, on what basis is this claim made? And what does such triumphalist rhetoric suggest not just about our national narcissism, but Washington's priorities? Consider that no leading U.S. politician thinks to boast that we have the finest educational system or health-care system or environmental policies "that the world has ever known."

Measured in terms of sheer destructive power, and our ability to project that power across the globe, the U.S. military is indeed the world's "finest" fighting force. Our nuclear arsenal remains second to none. Our air forces (including the Navy's carrier task forces, the Army's armada of helicopter gunships, and the CIA's fleet of unmanned aerial drones prosecuting a "secret" war in Pakistan) dominate the heavens. Our Navy ("a global force for good," according to its new motto) rules the waves -- even more so than old Britannia did a century ago. And well should we rule the skies and seas, given the roughly one trillion dollars a year we spend on achieving our vision of "full spectrum dominance."

But this awesome ability to exercise "global reach, global power" hardly makes us the finest military force ever. After all, "finest" shouldn't be measured by sheer strength and reach alone. First and foremost, of course, should come favorable results set against the quality of the opponents bested. To use a sports analogy, we wouldn't call the Pittsburgh Steelers "the finest team in NFL history" simply because they annihilated Penn State in football. Similarly, we can't measure the success of today's U.S. military solely in terms of amazingly quick (if increasingly costly and ultimately dismal) "victories" over the Taliban in 2001 or Saddam Hussein's Iraqi forces in 2003.

To carry the football analogy a few yards further, one might ask when our "finest fighting force" had its last Super Bowl win. Certainly, 1918 and 1945 (World Wars I and II) were such wins, even if as part of larger coalitions; 1953 (Korea) was a frustrating stalemate; 1973 (Vietnam) was a demoralizing loss; 1991 (Desert Storm in Iraq) was a distinctly flawed win; and efforts like Grenada or Panama or Serbia were more like scrimmages. Arguably our biggest win, the Cold War, was achieved less through military means than economic power and technological savvy.

To put it bluntly: America's troops are tough-minded professionals, but the finest fighting force ever? Sir, no, sir.

We're Number One!

Americans often seem to live in the eternal now, which makes it easier to boast that our military is the finest ever. Most historians, however, are not so tied to nationalistic rhetoric or the ceaseless present. If asked to identify the finest fighting force in history, my reaction -- and I would hardly be alone in the field -- would be to favor those peoples and empires which existed for war alone.

Examples immediately spring to mind: the Assyrians, the Spartans, the Romans, the Vikings, the Mongols, and the Nazis. These peoples elevated their respective militaries and martial prowess above all else. Unsurprisingly, they were bloodthirsty and ruthless. Unstinting ambition for imperial goals often drove them to remarkable feats of arms at an unconscionable and sometimes difficult to sustain cost. Yes, the Spartans defeated the Athenians, but that internecine quarrel paved the way for the demise of the independent Greek city states at the hands of Philip of Macedon and his son, Alexander (soon enough to be known as "the Great").

Yes, the Romans conquered an empire, but one of their own historians, Tacitus, put in the mouth of a Celtic chieftain this description of being on the receiving end of Roman "liberation":

"The Romans' tyranny cannot be escaped by any act of reasonable submission. These brigands of the world have exhausted the land by their rapacity, so they now ransack the sea. When their enemy is rich, they lust after wealth; when their enemy is poor, they lust after power. Neither East nor West has satisfied their hunger. They are unique among humanity insofar as they equally covet the rich and the poor. Robbery, butchery, and rapine they call 'Empire.' They create a desert and call it 'Peace.'"

Talk about tough love.

The Romans would certainly have to be in the running for "finest military" of all time. They conquered many peoples, expanded far, and garrisoned vast areas of the Mediterranean, North Africa, and what would become Europe, while their legions marched forth, often to victory (not to speak of plunder), for hundreds of years. Still, the gold medal for the largest land empire in history -- and the finest fighting force of all time -- must surely go to the thirteenth century Mongols.

Led by Genghis Khan and his successors, Mongol horsemen conquered China and the Islamic world -- the two most powerful, sophisticated civilizations of their day -- while also exerting control over Russia for two and a half centuries. And thanks to a combination of military excellence, clever stratagem, fleetness of foot (and far more important, hoof), flexibility, and when necessary utter ferocity, they did all this while generally being outnumbered by their enemies.

Even the fighting power of the finest militaries waxed and waned, however, based in part on the quality of those leading them. The Macedonians blossomed under Philip and Alexander. It was not simply Rome that conquered Gaul, but Julius Caesar. The Mongols were at each other's throats until Genghis Khan united them into an unstoppable military machine that swept across a continent. The revolutionary French people in their famed levée en masse had martial fervor, but only Napoleon gave them direction. History's finest fighting forces are associated closely with history's greatest captains.

Measure that against the American military today. General David Petraeus is certainly a successful officer who exhibits an enviable mastery of detail and a powerful political sense of how to handle Washington, but a Genghis Khan? An Alexander? A Caesar? Even "King David," as he's been called both by admirers and more than a few detractors, might blush at such comparisons. After all, at the head of the most powerfully destructive force in the Middle East, and later Central Asia, he has won no outright victories and conquered nothing. His triumph in Iraq in 2006-2007 may yet prove more "confected" than convincing.

As for our armed forces, though most Americans don't know it, within U.S. military circles much criticism exists of an officer corps of "tarnished brass" that is deficient in professionalism; of generals who are more concerned with covering their butts than leading from the front; of instruction at military academies that is divorced from war's realities; of an aversion "to innovation or creativity… [leading to] an atmosphere of anti-intellectualism" that undermines strategy and makes a hash of counterinsurgency efforts. Indeed, our military's biting criticism of itself is one of the few positive signs in a fighting force that is otherwise overstretched, deeply frustrated, and ridiculously overpraised by genuflecting politicians.

So I'm sorry, President Obama. If you wish to address the finest fighting force the world has ever known, you'll need a time machine, not Air Force One. You'll have to doff your leather Air Force-issue flight jacket and don Mongolian armor. And in so doing, you'll have to embrace mental attitudes and a way of life utterly antithetical to democracy and the rights of humanity as we understand them today. For that is the price of building a fighting force second to none -- and one reason why our politicians should stop insisting that we have one.

"The Greatest Force for Human Liberation"

Two centuries ago, Napoleon led his armies out of France and brought "liberty, equality, and fraternity" to much of the rest of ancien régime Europe -- but on his terms and via the barrel of a musket. His invasion of Spain, for example, was viewed as anything but a "liberation" by the Spanish, who launched a fierce guerrilla campaign against their French occupiers that sapped the strength of Napoleon's empire and what was generally considered the finest fighting force of its moment. British aid to the insurgency helped ensure that this campaign would become Napoleon's "Spanish ulcer."

The "Little Corporal" ultimately decided to indirectly strike back at the British by invading Russia, which was refusing to enforce France's so-called continental blockade. As Napoleon's army bled out or froze solid in the snows of a Russian winter, the Prussians and the Austrians found new reasons to reject French "fraternity." Within years, Napoleon's empire was unsaddled and destroyed, a fate shared by its leader, sent into ignominious exile on the island of Saint Helena.

Like Napoleon's fired up revolutionary troops, the American military also sees itself as on a mission to spread democracy and freedom. Afghans and Iraqis have, however, proven no more eager than the Spaniards of two centuries ago to be "liberated" at gun (or "Hellfire" missile) point, even when the liberators come bearing gifts, which in today's terms means the promise of roads, jobs, and "reconstruction," or even cash by the pallet.

Because we Americans believe our own press releases, it's difficult to imagine others (except, of course, those so fanatic as to be blind to reality) seeing us as anything but well-intentioned liberators. As journalist Nir Rosen has put it: "There's… a deep sense among people in the [American] policy world, in the military, that we're the good guys. It's just taken for granted that what we're doing must be right because we're doing it. We're the exceptional country, the essential nation, and our role, our intervention, our presence is a benign and beneficent thing."

In reporting on our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Rosen and others have offered ample proof for those who care to consider it that our foreign interventions have been anything but benign or beneficent, no less liberating. Our invasion of Iraq opened the way to civil war and mayhem. For many ordinary Iraqis, when American intervention didn't lead to death, destruction, dislocation, and exile, it bred "deep humiliation and disruption" as well as constant fear, a state of affairs that, as Rosen notes, is "painful and humiliating and scary."

In Afghanistan, Rosen points out, most villagers see our troops making common cause with a despised and predatory government. Huge infusions of American dollars, meanwhile, rarely trickle down to the village level, but instead promote the interests of Afghan warlords and foreign businesses. Small wonder that, more than nine years later, a majority of Afghans say they want to be liberated from us.

If the U.S. military is not "the greatest force for human liberation" in all history, what is? Revealingly, it's far easier to identify the finest fighting force of history. If put on the spot, though, I'd highlight the ideas and ideals of human dignity, of equality before the law, of the fundamental value of each and every individual, as the greatest force for human liberation. Such ideals are shared by many peoples. They may sometimes be defended by the sword, but were inscribed by the pens of great moralists and thinkers of humanity's collective past. In this sense, when it comes to advancing freedom, the pen has indeed been mightier than the sword.

Freedom Fighters for a Fading Empire

The historian John Lukacs once noted: "There are many things wrong with the internationalist idea to Make the World Safe for Democracy, one of them being that it is not that different from the nationalist idea that What Is Good for America Is Good for the World."

In our post-9/11 world, whatever our rhetoric about democratizing the planet, our ambitions are guided by the seemingly hardheaded goal of making Americans safe from terrorists. A global war on terrorism has, however, proven anything but consistent with expanding liberty at home or abroad. Indeed, the seductive and self-congratulatory narrative of our troops as selfless liberators and the finest freedom fighters around actually helps blind us to our violent methods in far-off lands, even as it distances us from the human costs of our imperial policies.

Though we officially seek to extinguish terrorists, our actions abroad serve as obvious accelerants to terror. To understand why this is so, ask yourself how comforted you would be if foreign military "liberators" kicked in your door, shouted commands in a language you didn't understand, confiscated your guns, dragged your father and brothers and sons off in cuffs and hoods to locations unknown, all in the name of "counterterror" operations? How comforted would you be if remotely piloted drones hovered constantly overhead, ready to unleash Hellfire missiles at terrorist "targets of opportunity" in your neighborhood?

Better not to contemplate such harsh realities. Better to praise our troops as so many Mahatma Gandhis, so many freedom fighters. Better to praise them as so many Genghis Khans, so many ultimate warriors.

At a time of feared national decline, our leaders undoubtedly prescribe military action in part to comfort us (and themselves) and restore our sense of potency and pride. In doing so, they violate the famous phrase long associated with the Hippocratic Oath: First, do no harm.

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, is a TomDispatch regular. He welcomes reader comments at [email protected]. To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview in which Astore discusses the military nightmares of a fading empire, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.

Copyright 2011 William J. Astore

[Sep 27, 2010] Andrew Bacevich, The Washington Gossip Machine TomDispatch by Andrew Bacevic

Tomgram

[Note for TomDispatch readers: Andrew Bacevich's new book, Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War, is now deservedly a New York Times bestseller. This website first posted the introduction to the book, "The Unmaking of a Company Man," already among TD's most popular pieces, in August. If you missed it, check it out by clicking here. The book has since received superb reviews in the New York Times ("a tough-minded, bracing and intelligent polemic against some 60 years of American militarism... the country is lucky to have a fierce, smart peacemonger like Bacevich…") and Washington Post ("brilliant"). Make sure it's on your bookshelf and a small reminder: whenever you travel to Amazon.com by clicking on a TomDispatch book link or book-cover link and buy a book we recommend or anything else, we get a small cut of your purchase, which helps keep us afloat. Many thanks. Tom]

We know the endpoint of the story: another bestseller for Bob Woodward, in this case about a president sandbagged by his own high command and administration officials at one another's throats over an inherited war gone wrong. But where did the story actually begin? Well, here's the strange thing: in a sense, Woodward's new book, Obama's Wars, which focuses heavily on an administration review of Afghan war policy in the fall of 2009, begins with... Woodward. Of course -- thank heavens for American media amnesia -- amid all the attention his book is getting, no one seems to recall that part of the tale.

Here it is: President Obama got sandbagged by the leaked release of what became known as "the McChrystal plan," a call by his war commander in the field General Stanley McChrystal (and assumedly the man above him, then-Centcom Commander General David Petraeus) for a 40,000-troop counterinsurgency "surge." As it happened, Bob Woodward, Washington Post reporter, not bestselling book writer, was assumedly the recipient of that judiciously leaked plan from a still-unknown figure, generally suspected of being in or close to the military. On September 21, 2009, Woodward was the one who then framed the story, writing the first stern front-page piece about the needs of the U.S. military in Afghanistan. Its headline laid out, from that moment on, the president's options: "McChrystal: More Forces or 'Mission Failure'" And its first paragraph went this way: "The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warns in an urgent, confidential assessment of the war that he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict 'will likely result in failure,' according to a copy of the 66-page document obtained by The Washington Post."

The frustration of a commander-in-chief backed into a corner by his own generals, the angry backbiting Woodward reportedly reveals in his book, all of it was, at least in part, a product of that leak and how it played out. In other words, looked at a certain way, Woodward facilitated the manufacture of the subject for his own bestseller. A nifty trick for Washington's leading stenographer.

The set of leaks -- how appropriate for Woodward -- that were the drumbeat of publicity for the new book over the last week also offered a classic outline of just how limited inside-the-Beltway policy options invariably turn out to be (no matter how fierce the debate about them). As one Washington Post piece put it: "[T]he only options that were seriously considered in the White House involved 30,000 to 40,000 more troops." All in all, it's a striking example of how the system really works, of how incestuously and narrowly -- to cite the title of Andrew Bacevich's bestselling new book -- Washington rules. Tom

Prisoners of War
Bob Woodward and All the President's Men (2010 Edition)

By Andrew J. Bacevich

Once a serious journalist, the Washington Post's Bob Woodward now makes a very fine living as chief gossip-monger of the governing class. Early on in his career, along with Carl Bernstein, his partner at the time, Woodward confronted power. Today, by relentlessly exalting Washington trivia, he flatters power. His reporting does not inform. It titillates.

A new Woodward book, Obama's Wars, is a guaranteed blockbuster. It's out this week, already causing a stir, and guaranteed to be forgotten the week after dropping off the bestseller lists. For good reason: when it comes to substance, any book written by Woodward has about as much heft as the latest potboiler penned by the likes of James Patterson or Tom Clancy.

Back in 2002, for example, during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Woodward treated us to Bush at War. Based on interviews with unidentified officials close to President George W. Bush, the book offered a portrait of the president-as-resolute-war-leader that put him in a league with Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. But the book's real juice came from what it revealed about events behind the scenes. "Bush's war cabinet is riven with feuding," reported the Times of London, which credited Woodward with revealing "the furious arguments and personal animosity" that divided Bush's lieutenants.

Of course, the problem with the Bush administration wasn't that folks on the inside didn't play nice with one another. No, the problem was that the president and his inner circle committed a long series of catastrophic errors that produced an unnecessary and grotesquely mismanaged war. That war has cost the country dearly -- although the people who engineered that catastrophe, many of them having pocketed handsome advances on their forthcoming memoirs, continue to manage quite well, thank you.

To judge by the publicity blitzkrieg announcing the arrival of Obama's Wars in your local bookstore, the big news out of Washington is that, even today, politics there remains an intensely competitive sport, with the participants, whether in anger or frustration, sometimes speaking ill of one another.

Essentially, news reports indicate, Woodward has updated his script from 2002. The characters have different names, but the plot remains the same. Talk about jumping the shark.

So we learn that Obama political adviser David Axelrod doesn't fully trust Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. National security adviser James Jones, a retired Marine general, doesn't much care for the likes of Axelrod, and will say so behind his back. Almost everyone thinks Richard Holbrooke, chief State Department impresario of the AfPak portfolio, is a jerk. And -- stop the presses -- when under the influence of alcohol, General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, is alleged to use the word "f**ked." These are the sort of shocking revelations that make you a headliner on the Sunday morning talk shows.

Based on what we have learned so far from those select few provided with advance copies of the book -- mostly reporters for the Post and The New York Times who, for whatever reason, seem happy to serve as its shills -- Obama's Wars contains hints of another story, the significance of which seems to have eluded Woodward.

The theme of that story is not whether Dick likes Jane, but whether the Constitution remains an operative document. The Constitution explicitly assigns to the president the role of commander-in-chief. Responsibility for the direction of American wars rests with him. According to the principle of civilian control, senior military officers advise and execute, but it's the president who decides. That's the theory, at least. Reality turns out to be considerably different and, to be kind about it, more complicated.

Obama's Wars reportedly contains this comment by President Obama to Secretary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates regarding Afghanistan: "I'm not doing 10 years... I'm not doing long-term nation-building. I am not spending a trillion dollars."

Aren't you, Mr. President? Don't be so sure.

Obama's Wars also affirms what we already suspected about the decision-making process that led up to the president's announcement at West Point in December 2009 to prolong and escalate the war. Bluntly put, the Pentagon gamed the process to exclude any possibility of Obama rendering a decision not to its liking.

Pick your surge: 20,000 troops? Or 30,000 troops? Or 40,000 troops? Only the most powerful man in the world -- or Goldilocks contemplating three bowls of porridge -- could handle a decision like that. Even as Obama opted for the middle course, the real decision had already been made elsewhere by others: the war in Afghanistan would expand and continue.

And then there's this from the estimable General David Petraeus: "I don't think you win this war," Woodward quotes the field commander as saying. "I think you keep fighting... This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids' lives."

Here we confront a series of questions to which Woodward (not to mention the rest of Washington) remains steadfastly oblivious. Why fight a war that even the general in charge says can't be won? What will the perpetuation of this conflict cost? Who will it benefit? Does the ostensibly most powerful nation in the world have no choice but to wage permanent war? Are there no alternatives? Can Obama shut down an unwinnable war now about to enter its tenth year? Or is he -- along with the rest of us -- a prisoner of war?

President Obama has repeatedly stated that in July 2011 a withdrawal of U. S. troops from Afghanistan will commence. No one quite knows exactly what that means. Will the withdrawal be symbolic? General Petraeus has already made it abundantly clear that he will entertain nothing more. Or will July signal that the Afghan War -- and by extension the Global War on Terror launched nine years ago -- is finally coming to an end?

Between now and next summer attentive Americans will learn much about how national security policy is actually formulated and who is really in charge. Just don't expect Bob Woodward to offer any enlightenment on the subject.

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His new book is Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War.

Copyright 2010 Andrew J. Bacevich

[Aug 07, 2010] Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (American Empire Project) [Hardcover]

RBSProds "rbsprods": August 5, 2010 AN OUTSTANDING ASSESSMENT OF THE "WASHINGTON RULES": USA WARTIME POLICIES & ACTIONS,

Five ENGROSSING Stars!! This is Andrew J Bacevich's outstanding, deeply researched, hard-hitting work of scholarship, assessing America's national and foreign policies as well as the personalities and groups that have led us into the business of confrontation, power projection, and war, time and time again. Essentially this book is the outgrowth of Mr. Bacevich's 20 year self-education, which began at the age of 41 as a military officer who began to see the international world in a new light based on an epiphany at Berlin's Brandenburg gate. Looking at over six decades of wartime policy and actions in the "American Century", Mr Bacevich discloses the "Washington Rules" and the credo wherein the USA has assumed the mantle of attempting to "lead, save, liberate, and transform" the world to assure international order and peace. He takes us from the Truman-era administrations to the Obama administration, detailing how the "sacred trinity" of global military presence, global power projection, global interventionism is used to achieve those ends, using his "Washington Rules" as the template. The Jimmy Carter segment was particularly eye-opening. Mr Bacevich shows that regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats are in power, the US has had an attitude that we are uniquely qualified to take on the worldwide foes of peace and democracy, forgetting, revising, or ignoring the painful lessons of World War II, Vietnam, and beyond that might have taken the USA into periods of unprecedented peace, instead of numerous conflicts.

Lessons that the author shows President Obama is clearly in the midst of learning, using a modified sacred trinity. Written in engaging prose, this is a very absorbing work of research with sections that some may find very troubling based on the decisions of our leaders. If I could recommend one book that President Obama and the Congress should read, this is it. But it should also be read by those who were and were not alive during our mid-20th Century wars and military encounters.

My Highest Recommendation! Five ABSORBING Stars!! (This review is based on a Kindle download in iPhone mode and Kindle text-to-speech mode.)

Loyd E. Eskildson "Pragmatist" (Phoenix, AZ.)

Time has expired on the 'American Century,' says retired Col. Bacevich, and this is the time to reject militarism and recognize that fixing Detroit takes precedence over Afghanistan. Bacevich's aim is to re-examine assumptions, habits, and precepts that have defined our foreign/military policy since the end of WWII. All well and good, but Bacevich devotes too many pages to recounting how we got to this point post-WWII, mostly focused on individuals such as Curtis LeMay, Allen Dulles, Maxwell Taylor, etc.

Almost no attention is given to how support for Israel, Iraq War I and the subsequent stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia, etc. brought us 9/11, a never-ending state of War on Terrorism, and the organizational monstrosity known as the Dept. of Homeland Security with its 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies consuming unknown billions of dollars.

Our self-appointed role of leading, liberating, and saving the world through activism, hard power, and negotiating from strength continues today - DOD has become the Department of Global Policing, and President Obama finds himself continuing the model laid down since 1945. The author also skims over too quickly how we have exhausted the authority and goodwill acquired immediately after WWII - via the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Iraq I and II, Afghanistan I and II, the 2007 Recession, going from the world's largest creditor to debtor nation, decades of trade and government deficits, energy profligacy, decaying cities, manufacturing, and infrastructure, Katrina, supporting dictators and human rights abusers, etc.

DOD consumes $700 billion/year (I'm assuming that includes Iraq and Afghanistan), while stationing 300,000 troops abroad in 761 sites in 39 nations, plus 90,000 sailors and marines at sea. Our expenditures approximate those of the rest of the world combined. and are propelling us towards insolvency and perpetual war.

An excellent example of how we are digging ourselves into a hole occurred just this week when the U.S. announced the State Department is in advanced discussions with Vietnam to share nuclear fuels and technologies in a deal that would preserve Hanoi's right to enrich uranium indigenously. This obviously undermines our containment stance vs. North Korea and Iran, and is intended to somehow intimidate China. Similarly, the U.S. is also supporting India's enrichment and military-fuel capability efforts - again to somehow intimidate China.

Meanwhile, we also parade a flotilla of ships nearby off South Korea to intimidate North Korea, and further irritate China. (They now have, or soon will have, supersonic missiles capable of raining down on our aircraft carrier task forces - a great example of asymmetric warfare that makes our Navy look obsolete and a near total waste.) And then we wonder why China is modernizing its military.

Col. Bacevich's conclusion - "It's time (for America) to choose."

[Aug 07, 2010] Washington Rules America's Path to Permanent War' - Newsweek

Groupthink is alive and thriving in Washington, D.C., argues Bacevich, who's convinced that America's mightily militaristic and endlessly idealistic approach to the rest of the world is costing the country dearly. Boiling down his argument to the simplest terms: the world would get along just fine without this overarmed global policeman, and more important, the United States would fare far better at home if it weren't squandering so many of its gifts abroad.

What's the Big Deal?

The Pentagon, a nearly three-quarter-trillion-dollar agency, is the largest industrial organization on the planet. And it's armed to the gills. Washington's best and brightest minds-in Bacevich's estimate, the "elected and appointed officials, corporate executives and corporate lobbyists, admirals and generals, functionaries staffing the national security apparatus, media personalities, and policy intellectuals," who are all deriving "profit, power, and privilege" from the status quo-have not only failed you and me, they are steadily running the country into ruin. Though at times he makes his argument with the wrong tools, Bacevich's chief concern-that we're misusing our military-couldn't be more important.

[Aug 07, 2010] Letters What collapsing empire looks like - Salon

Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War

Andrew Bacevich's new book. A relevant new book everyone should pick up and read.

From the first chapter:

This book aims to take stock of conventional wisdom in its most influential and enduring form, namely the package of assumptions, habits, and precepts that have defined the tradition of statecraft to which the United States has adhered since the end of World War II – the era of global dominance now drawing to a close. This postwar tradition combines two components, each one so deeply embedded in the American collective consciousness as to have but disappeared from view.

The first component specified norms according to which the international order ought to work and charges the United States with responsibility for enforcing those norms. Call this the American credo. In the simplest terms, the credo summons the United States – and the United States alone – to lead, save, liberate, and ultimately transform the world. In a celebrated manifesto issued at the dawn of what he termed "The American Century," Henry R. Luce made the case for this spacious conception of global leadership. Writing in Life magazine in early 1941, the influential publisher exhorted his fellow citizens to "accept wholeheartedly our to duty to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit." Luce thereby captured what remains even today of the credo's essence.

Luce's concept of an American Century, an age of unquestioned American global primacy, resonated, especially in Washington. His evocative phrase found a permanent place in the lexicon of national politics. (Recall that the neoconservatives who, in the 1990s, lobbied for more militant U.S. Policies named their enterprise the Project for a New American Century). So, too, did Luce's expansive claim of prerogatives to be exercised by the United States. Even today, whenever public figures allude to America's responsibility to lead, they signal their fidelity to this creed. Along with respectful allusions to God and "the troops," adherence to Luce's credo has become a de facto prerequisite for high office. Question its claims and your prospects of heard in the hubbub of national politics becomes nil.

Note, however, that the duty Luce ascribed to Americans has two components. It is not only up to American, he wrote, to choose the purposes for which they would bring their influence to bear, but to choose the means as well. Here we confront the second component of the postwar tradition of American statecraft.

[snip]

Every great military power has its distinctive signature. For Napoleonic France, it was the levee en masse - the people in arms animated by the ideals of the revolution. For Great Britain in the heyday of empire, it was command of the seas, sustained by a dominant fleet and a network of far-flung outposts from Gibraltar and the Cape of Good Hope to Singapore and Hong Kong. Germany from the 1860s to the 1940s (and Israel from 1948 to 1973) took another approach, relying on a potent blend of tactical flexibility and operational audacity to achieve battlefield superiority.

The abiding signature of American military power since World War II has been of a different order altogether. The United States has not specialized in any particular type of war. It has not adhered to a fixed tactical style. No single service or weapon has enjoyed constant favor. At times, the armed forces have relied on citizen-soldiers to fill their ranks; at other times, long-service professionals. Yet an examination of the past sixty years of U.S. military policy and practice does reveal important elements of continuity. Call the sacred trinity: an abiding conviction that the minimum essentials of international peace and order require the United States to maintain a global military presence, to configure its forces for global power projection, and to counter existing or anticipated threats by relying on a policy of global interventionism.

Together, credo and trinity – the one defining purpose, the other practice – constitute the essence of the way that Washington has attempted to govern and police the American Century. The relationship between the two is symbiotic. The trinity leads plausibility to the credo's vast claims. For its part, the credo justifies the trinity's vast requirements and exertions. Together they provide the basis for an enduring consensus that imparts a consistency to U.S. policy regardless of which political party may hold the White House. From the era of Harry Truman to the age of Barack Obama, that consensus has remained intact. It defines the rules to which Washington adheres; it determines the precepts by which Washington rules.

[snip]

The persistence of these rules has also provided an excuse to avoid serious self-engagement. From this perspective, confidence that the credo and the trinity will oblige others to accommodate themselves to America's needs or desires – whether for cheap oil, cheap credit, or cheap consumer goods – has allowed Washington to postpone or ignore problems demanding attention here at home. Fixing Iraq or Afghanistan ends up taking precedence over Cleveland and Detroit. Purporting to support the troops in their crusade to free the world obviates any obligation to assess the implications of how Americans themselves choose to exercise freedom.

When Americans demonstrate a willingness to engage seriously with others, combined with the courage to engage seriously with themselves, then the real education just might begin.

-Chris Sinnard

[Mar 1, 2009] The New American Militarism How Americans Are Seduced by War

Amazon.com

A Panaramic Analysis of American Militarism., November 1, 2008

Scripture Studier (WI,USA) - See all my reviews

"The New American Militarism-How Americans Are Seduced by War" is an analysis of the subject from multiple viewpoints. Andrew Bacevich examines American militarism from the point of: politicians, the military, evangelical Christians, and society in general.

In the Preface the author is quite candid and humble about himself, his idealogy, and some of the experiences that helped form his positions.
"Some will misread this as cynicism. It is instead the absence of illusion."
He doesn't attempt to lay blame.

The chapter on the neoconservative idealogy (Left,Right,Left)was very good. Some of the leaders were "devout Wilsonians, devoted to the proposition that American values are by definition universal values." That's an accurate assessment of exporting democracy.
"The conception of politics to which neoconservatives paid allegiance owed more to the ethos of the Left than the orthodoxes of the Right.On the Right they hoped to find the oppurtunity to create the alternative perception of reality necessary for fulfilling their radical aspirations." One of those aspirations was the global empire that we have now.

In analyzing the view of evangelical Christians on militarism he made this truthful observation on page 124-
"The relationship between Christianity and war has been a tangled one. Despite Christ's admonition to love one's neighbor and to turn the other cheek, Christians historically have slaughtered their fellow men, to include their fellow Christians, in breathtakingly large numbers."
Some Christian advocate war more than others.

Some more subject matter that I found revelatory were:

*The author compares current and past presidents foreign policy to that of Woodrow Wilson.
*The analysis of the Weinberger and Powell Doctrines regarding pre-conditions for engagement.
*Where the idea for prosecuting two wars concurrently originated.
*The quote from a Pentagon General assessing Rumsfeld as someone who has "done more damage to the country than we will recover from in 50 years" was sobering.
*The "priesthood of strategists". Who they are and how deeply they have affected military strategy .
*A comparison of former presidents and how they viewed and sometimes utilized the military.

Mr. Bacevich offers some sensible solutions to the current problems of American militarism, one being to utilize the National Guard more at home for Homeland Security activities. Border Patrol would make sense.

"American policymakers should employ force only with reluctance and after the most careful deliberation....and it should do so with one eye cocked on the home front, wary of claims of military necessity being used to compromise our civil liberties."

My interest in Andrew Bacevich's books was kindled by watching an appearance he made on Bill Moyer's program to promote "The Limits of Power." This book is one of the best I have read in some time. I'd rate it highly and in the league of Chalmers Johnson's books.

[Dec 08, 2008] Bacevich: The Limits of Power

As Bacevich states the USA foreign policy was directly by internal impulses and first of all the desire to sustain overconsumption. But now the USA foreign policy became a factor that influence the economic policy. In this context you can reread famous Bush quote: "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." Aug. 5, 2004
September 30, 2008 | Bigpicture

Is an imperial presidency destroying what America stands for?

Bill Moyers sits down with history and international relations expert and former US Army Colonel Andrew J. Bacevich who identifies three major problems facing our democracy: the crises of economy, government and militarism, and calls for a redefinition of the American way of life.

Part I

click for video

Part II

click for video

September 26, 2008

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL.

Here in New York a new season is opening on and off Broadway. But nothing, not even a comic opera, can compete with the spectacle, drama and farce of what's happening in Washington and on Wall Street.

If it is possible for a political system, like individuals, to become deranged, so unhinged from reality there is no longer any regard for the consequences, we saw the process this week. It's nothing but bizarre, and for a supposedly mature democracy, deeply troubling.

For technical reasons we had to tape this broadcast before John McCain finally made up his mind about whether to show up for the debate tonight. So we decided not to try and second guess events.

Instead, we are going to hear some truth-telling from a man who says our country's in deep trouble and needs a renewed commitment to critical thinking, honest words, and hard choices.

In this slim volume on THE LIMITS OF POWER, Andrew J. Bacevich goes to the root causes of our discontent and to our broken and foundering politics. That many people agree with this unsentimental diagnosis was apparent when we first aired this interview a few weeks ago, your emails poured in to pbs.org. In a matter of hours his book had become a best-seller.

Now, with chaos in Washington and the markets, it seems a good time to give this soldier, scholar, and patriot another hearing. He has found an audience across the political spectrum, whether writing for THE NATION or THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE magazines, lecturing to college classes or testifying before Congress.

ANDREW BACEVICH: ...fixing our problems before fixing the world's problems.

BILL MOYERS: Bacevich speaks truth to power, no matter who's in power, which may be why those on both the left and right listen to him. Perhaps it's also because when he challenges American myths and illusions, he does so from a patriotism forged in the fire of experience as a soldier in Vietnam.

After 23 years in the army, this West Point graduate has been teaching international relations and history at Boston University.

Andrew J. Bacevich is with me now, welcome to the JOURNAL.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Thank you very much for having me.

BILL MOYERS: It's been a long time since I've read a book in which I highlighted practically every third sentence. So, it took me a while to read, what is in fact, a rather short book. You began with a quote from the Bible, the Book of Second Kings, chapter 20, verse one. "Set thine house in order." How come that admonition?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I've been troubled by the course of U.S. foreign policy for a long, long time. And I wrote the book in order to sort out my own thinking about where our basic problems lay. And I really reached the conclusion that our biggest problems are within.

I think there's a tendency on the part of policy makers and probably a tendency on the part of many Americans to think that the problems we face are problems that are out there somewhere, beyond our borders. And that if we can fix those problems, then we'll be able to continue the American way of life as it has long existed. I think it's fundamentally wrong. Our major problems are at home.

BILL MOYERS: So, this is a version of "Physician, heal thyself?"

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, yes, "Physician, heal thyself," and you begin healing yourself by looking at yourself in the mirror and seeing yourself as you really are.

BILL MOYERS: Here is one of those neon sentences. Quote,

"The pursuit of freedom, as defined in an age of consumerism, has induced a condition of dependence on imported goods, on imported oil, and on credit. The chief desire of the American people," you write, "is that nothing should disrupt their access to these goods, that oil, and that credit. The chief aim of the U.S. government is to satisfy that desire, which it does in part of through the distribution of largesse here at home, and in part through the pursuit of imperial ambitions abroad."

In other words, you're saying that our foreign policy is the result of a dependence on consumer goods and credit.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Our foreign policy is not something simply concocted by people in Washington D.C. and imposed on us. Our foreign policy is something that is concocted in Washington D.C., but it reflects the perceptions of our political elite about what we want, we the people want. And what we want, by and large - I mean, one could point to many individual exceptions - but, what we want, by and large is, we want this continuing flow of very cheap consumer goods.

We want to be able to pump gas into our cars regardless of how big they may happen to be, in order to be able to drive wherever we want to be able to drive. And we want to be able to do these things without having to think about whether or not the book's balanced at the end of the month, or the end of the fiscal year. And therefore, we want this unending line of credit.

BILL MOYERS: You intrigued me when you wrote that "The fundamental problem facing the country will remain stubbornly in place no matter who is elected in November." What's the fundamental problem you say is not going away no matter whether it's McCain or Obama?

ANDREW BACEVICH: What neither of these candidates will be able to, I think, accomplish is to persuade us to look ourselves in the mirror, to see the direction in which we are headed. And from my point of view, it's a direction towards ever greater debt and dependency.

BILL MOYERS: And you write that "What will not go away, is a yawning disparity between what Americans expect, and what they're willing or able to pay." Explore that a little bit.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I think one of the ways we avoid confronting our refusal to balance the books is to rely increasingly on the projection of American military power around the world to try to maintain this dysfunctional system, or set of arrangements that have evolved over the last 30 or 40 years.

But, it's not the American people who are deploying around the world. It is a very specific subset of our people, this professional army. We like to call it an all-volunteer force-

BILL MOYERS: Right.

ANDREW BACEVICH: - but the truth is, it's a professional army, and when we think about where we send that army, it's really an imperial army. I mean, if as Americans, we could simply step back a little bit, and contemplate the significance of the fact that Americans today are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ask ourselves, how did it come to be that organizing places like Iraq and Afghanistan should have come to seem to be critical to the well-being of the United States of America.

There was a time, seventy, eighty, a hundred years ago, that we Americans sat here in the western hemisphere, and puzzled over why British imperialists went to places like Iraq and Afghanistan. We viewed that sort of imperial adventurism with disdain. But, it's really become part of what we do. Unless a President could ask fundamental questions about our posture in the world, it becomes impossible then, for any American President to engage the American people in some sort of a conversation about how and whether or not to change the way we live.

BILL MOYERS: How is Iraq a clear manifestation, as you say, of this, "yawning disparity between what Americans expect, and what they're willing to pay?"

ANDREW BACEVICH: Let's think about World War Two. A war that President Roosevelt told us was essential to U.S. national security, and was. And President Roosevelt said at the time, because this is an important enterprise, you, the American people, will be called upon to make sacrifices. And indeed, the people of the United States went off to fight that war in large numbers. It was a national effort. None of that's been true with regard to Iraq. I mean, one of the most striking things about the way the Bush Administration has managed the Global War on Terror, which President Bush has compared to World War Two.

BILL MOYERS: Right.

ANDREW BACEVICH: One of the most striking things about it is that there was no effort made to mobilize the country, there was actually no effort even made to expand the size of the armed forces, as a matter of fact. The President said just two weeks or so after 9/11, "Go to Disney World. Go shopping." Well, there's something out of whack here, if indeed the Global War on Terror, and Iraq as a subset of the Global War on Terror is said to be so critically important, on the one hand. And on the other hand, when the country basically goes about its business, as if, really, there were no War on Terror, and no war in Iraq ongoing at all.

BILL MOYERS: "So it is," you write, "seven years into its confrontation with radical Islam, the United States finds itself with too much war for too few warriors and with no prospect of producing the additional soldiers needed to close the gap." When I hear all this talk about increasing the troops in Afghanistan from two to three battalions, maybe even more, I keep asking myself, where are we going to get those troops?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, and of course the answer is, they have to come from Iraq. I mean, as we speak, the security conditions in Iraq have improved a little bit, and in a sense, it's just in time, because what the Pentagon wants to do is to draw down its presence in Iraq to some degree, not in order to give those troops a breather, but in order to redeploy them after a period of retraining to Afghanistan, because Afghanistan is going so poorly. So, we're having a very difficult time managing two wars which, in the 20th century context, they're actually relatively small.

BILL MOYERS: You say, "U.S. troops in battle dress and body armor, whom Americans profess to admire and support, pay the price for the nation's refusal to confront our domestic dysfunction." What are we not confronting?

ANDREW BACEVICH: The most obvious, the blindingly obviously question, is energy. It's oil. I think historians a hundred years from now will puzzle over how it could be that the United States of America, the most powerful nation in the world, as far back as the early 1970s, came to recognize that dependence on foreign oil was a problem, posed a threat, comprised our freedom of action.

How every President from Richard Nixon down to the present one, President Bush, declared, "We're gonna fix this problem." None of them did. And the reason we are in Iraq today is because the Persian Gulf is at the center of the world's oil reserves. I don't mean that we invaded Iraq on behalf of big oil, but the Persian Gulf region would have zero strategic significance, were it not for the fact that that's where the oil is.

Back in 1980, I think, President Carter, in many respects when he declared the Carter Doctrine, and said that henceforth, the Persian Gulf had enormous strategic significance to the United States and the United States is not going to permit any other country to control that region of the world.

And that set in motion a set of actions that has produced the militarization of U.S. policy, ever deeper involvement in the region, and in essence, has postponed that day of reckoning when we need to understand the imperative of having an energy policy, and trying to restore some semblance of energy independence.

BILL MOYERS: And this is connected, as you say in the book, in your first chapters, of what you call "the crisis of profligacy."

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, we don't live within our means. I mean, the nation doesn't, and increasingly, individual Americans don't. Our saving - the individual savings rate in this country is below zero. The personal debt, national debt, however you want to measure it, as individuals and as a government, and as a nation we assume an endless line of credit.

As individuals, the line of credit is not endless, that's one of the reasons why we're having this current problem with the housing crisis, and so on. And my view would be that the nation's assumption, that its line of credit is endless, is also going to be shown to be false. And when that day occurs it's going to be a black day, indeed.

BILL MOYERS: You call us an "empire of consumption."

ANDREW BACEVICH: I didn't create that phrase. It's a phrase drawn from a book by a wonderful historian at Harvard University, Charles Maier, and the point he makes in his very important book is that, if we think of the United States at the apex of American power, which I would say would be the immediate post World War Two period, through the Eisenhower years, into the Kennedy years. We made what the world wanted. They wanted our cars. We exported our television sets, our refrigerators - we were the world's manufacturing base. He called it an "empire of production."

BILL MOYERS: Right.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Sometime around the 1960s there was a tipping point, when the "empire of production" began to become the "empire of consumption." When the cars started to be produced elsewhere, and the television sets, and the socks, and everything else. And what we ended up with was the American people becoming consumers rather than producers.

BILL MOYERS: And you say this has produced a condition of profound dependency, to the extent, and I'm quoting you, "Americans are no longer masters of their own fate."

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, they're not. I mean, the current debt to the Chinese government grows day by day. Why? Well, because of the negative trade balance. Our negative trade balance with the world is something in the order of $800 billion per year. That's $800 billion of stuff that we buy, so that we can consume, that is $800 billion greater than the amount of stuff that we sell to them. That's a big number. I mean, it's a big number even relative to the size of our economy.

BILL MOYERS: And you use this metaphor that is intriguing. American policy makers, quote, "have been engaged in a de facto Ponzi scheme, intended to extend indefinitely, the American line of credit." What's going on that resembles a Ponzi scheme?

ANDREW BACEVICH: This continuing tendency to borrow and to assume that the bills are never going to come due. I testified before a House committee six weeks ago now, on the future of U.S grand strategy. I was struck by the questions coming from members that showed an awareness, a sensitivity, and a deep concern, about some of the issues that I tried to raise in the book.

"How are we gonna pay the bills? How are we gonna pay for the commitment of entitlements that is going to increase year by year for the next couple of decades, especially as baby boomers retire?" Nobody has answers to those questions. So, I was pleased that these members of Congress understood the problem. I was absolutely taken aback when they said, "Professor, what can we do about this?" And their candid admission that they didn't have any answers, that they were perplexed, that this problem of learning to live within our means seemed to have no politically plausible solution.

BILL MOYERS: You say in here that the tipping point between wanting more than we were willing to pay for began in the Johnson Administration. "We can fix the tipping point with precision," you write. "It occurred between 1965, when President Lyndon Baines Johnson ordered U.S. combat troops to South Vietnam, and 1973, when President Richard Nixon finally ended direct U.S. involvement in that war." Why do you see that period so crucial?

ANDREW BACEVICH: When President Johnson became President, our trade balance was in the black. By the time we get to the Nixon era, it's in the red. And it stays in the red down to the present. Matter of fact, the trade imbalance becomes essentially larger year by year.

So, I think that it is the '60s, generally, the Vietnam period, slightly more specifically, was the moment when we began to lose control of our economic fate. And most disturbingly, we're still really in denial. We still haven't recognized that.

BILL MOYERS: Now you go on to say that there was another fateful period between July 1979 and March of 1983. You describe it, in fact, as a pivot of contemporary American history. That includes Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, right?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I would be one of the first to confess that - I think that we have misunderstood and underestimated President Carter. He was the one President of our time who recognized, I think, the challenges awaiting us if we refused to get our house in order.

BILL MOYERS: You're the only author I have read, since I read Jimmy Carter, who gives so much time to the President's speech on July 15th, 1979. Why does that speech speak to you so strongly?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, this is the so-called Malaise Speech, even though he never used the word "malaise" in the text to the address. It's a very powerful speech, I think, because President Carter says in that speech, oil, our dependence on oil, poses a looming threat to the country. If we act now, we may be able to fix this problem. If we don't act now, we're headed down a path in which not only will we become increasingly dependent upon foreign oil, but we will have opted for a false model of freedom. A freedom of materialism, a freedom of self-indulgence, a freedom of collective recklessness. And what the President was saying at the time was, we need to think about what we mean by freedom. We need to choose a definition of freedom which is anchored in truth, and the way to manifest that choice, is by addressing our energy problem.

He had a profound understanding of the dilemma facing the country in the post Vietnam period. And of course, he was completely hooted, derided, disregarded.

BILL MOYERS: And he lost the election. You in fact say-

ANDREW BACEVICH: Exactly.

BILL MOYERS: This speech killed any chance he had of winning reelection. Why? Because the American people didn't want to settle for less?

ANDREW BACEVICH: They absolutely did not. And indeed, the election of 1980 was the great expression of that, because in 1980, we have a candidate, perhaps the most skillful politician of our time, Ronald Reagan, who says that, "Doom-sayers, gloom-sayers, don't listen to them. The country's best days are ahead of us."

BILL MOYERS: Morning in America.

ANDREW BACEVICH: It's Morning in America. And you don't have to sacrifice, you can have more, all we need to do is get government out of the way, and drill more holes for oil, because the President led us to believe the supply of oil was infinite.

BILL MOYERS: You describe Ronald Reagan as the "modern prophet of profligacy. The politician who gave moral sanction to the empire of consumption."

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, to understand the truth about President Reagan, is to understand why so much of what we imagined to be our politics is misleading and false. He was the guy who came in and said we need to shrink the size of government. Government didn't shrink during the Reagan era, it grew.

He came in and he said we need to reduce the level of federal spending. He didn't reduce it, it went through the roof, and the budget deficits for his time were the greatest they had been since World War Two.

BILL MOYERS: And do you remember that it was his successor, his Vice President, the first President Bush who said in 1992, the American way of life is not negotiable.

ANDREW BACEVICH: And all presidents, again, this is not a Republican thing, or a Democratic thing, all presidents, all administrations are committed to that proposition. Now, I would say, that probably, 90 percent of the American people today would concur. The American way of life is not up for negotiation.

What I would invite them to consider is that, if you want to preserve that which you value most in the American way of life, and of course you need to ask yourself, what is it you value most. That if you want to preserve that which you value most in the American way of life, then we need to change the American way of life. We need to modify that which may be peripheral, in order to preserve that which is at the center of what we value.

BILL MOYERS: What do you value most?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I think the clearest statement of what I value is found in the preamble to the Constitution. There is nothing in the preamble to the Constitution which defines the purpose of the United States of America as remaking the world in our image, which I view as a fool's errand. There is nothing in the preamble of the Constitution that ever imagined that we would embark upon an effort, as President Bush has defined it, to transform the Greater Middle East. This region of the world that incorporates something in order of 1.4 billion people.

I believe that the framers of the Constitution were primarily concerned with focusing on the way we live here, the way we order our affairs. To try to ensure that as individuals, we can have an opportunity to pursue our, perhaps, differing definitions of freedom, but also so that, as a community, we could live together in some kind of harmony. And that future generations would also be able to share in those same opportunities.

The big problem, it seems to me, with the current crisis in American foreign policy, is that unless we do change our ways, the likelihood that our children, our grandchildren, the next generation is going to enjoy the opportunities that we've had, is very slight, because we're squandering our power. We are squandering our wealth. In many respects, to the extent that we persist in our imperial delusions, we're also going to squander our freedom because imperial policies, which end up enhancing the authority of the imperial president, also end up providing imperial presidents with an opportunity to compromise freedom even here at home. And we've seen that since 9/11.

BILL MOYERS: The disturbing thing that you say again and again in here, is that every President since Reagan has relied on military power to conceal or manage these problems that stem from the nation's habits of profligacy, right?

ANDREW BACEVICH: That's exactly right. And again, this is, I think, this is another issue where one needs to be unsparing in fixing responsibility as much on liberal Democratic presidents as conservative Republican ones. I think that the Bush Administration's response to 9/11 in constructing this paradigm of a global war on terror, in promulgating the so called, Bush Doctrine of Preventive War, in plunging into Iraq - utterly unnecessary war - will go down in our history as a record of recklessness that will be probably unmatched by any other administration.

But, doesn't really mean that Bill Clinton before him, or George Herbert Walker Bush before him, or Ronald Reagan before him, were all that much better. Because they all have seen military power as our strong suit. They all have worked under the assumption that through the projection of power, or the threat to employ power, that we can fix the world. Fix the world in order to sustain this dysfunctional way of life that we have back here.

BILL MOYERS: So, this brings us to what you call the political crisis of America. And you say, "The actual system of government conceived by the framers no longer pertains." What pertains?

ANDREW BACEVICH: I am expressing in the book, in a sense, what many of us sense, even if many of us don't really want to confront the implications. The Congress, especially with regard to matters related to national security policy, has thrust power and authority to the executive branch. We have created an imperial presidency. The congress no longer is able to articulate a vision of what is the common good. The Congress exists primarily to ensure the reelection of members of Congress.

As the imperial presidency has accrued power, surrounding the imperial presidency has come to be this group of institutions called the National Security State. The CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the other intelligence agencies. Now, these have grown since the end of World War Two into this mammoth enterprise.

But the National Security State doesn't work. The National Security State was not able to identify the 9/11 conspiracy. Was not able to deflect the attackers on 9/11. The National Security State was not able to plan intelligently for the Iraq War. Even if you think that the Iraq War was necessary. They were not able to put together an intelligent workable plan for that war.

The National Security State has not been able to provide the resources necessary to fight this so called global war on terror. So, as the Congress has moved to the margins, as the President has moved to the center of our politics, the presidency itself has come to be, I think, less effective. The system is broken.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah, you say no one knows what they're doing, including the President. No one in Washington, as you say, that's the political crisis, as you define it, no one in Washington knows what they're doing.

ANDREW BACEVICH: What I mean specifically is this. The end of the Cold War coincided almost precisely with the first Persian Gulf War of 1990, 1991, Operation Desert Storm. Operation Desert Storm was perceived to be this great, historic, never before seen victory. It really wasn't.

BILL MOYERS: The mother of all battles-

ANDREW BACEVICH: Right, I mean-

BILL MOYERS: Schwarzkopf cam-

ANDREW BACEVICH: Politically, and strategically, the outcome of that war was far more ambiguous than people appreciated at the time. But nonetheless, the war itself was advertised as this great success, demonstrating that a new American way of war had been developed, and that this new American way of war held the promise of enabling the United States to exercise military dominion on a global basis in ways that the world had never seen.

The people in the Pentagon had developed a phrase to describe this. They called it, "full spectrum dominance." Meaning, that the United States was going to exercise dominance, not just capability, dominance across the full spectrum of warfare. And this became the center of the way that the military advertised its capabilities in the 1990s. That was fraud. That was fraudulent.

To claim that the United States military could demonstrate that kind of dominance flew in the face of all of history and in many respects, set us up for how the Bush Administration was going to respond to 9/11. Because if you believed that United States military was utterly unstoppable, then it became kind of plausible to imagine that the appropriate response to 9/11 was to embark upon this global war to transform the greater Middle East. Had the generals been more cognoscente of the history of war, and of the nature of war, then they might have been in a better position to argue to Mr. Rumsfeld, then the Secretary of Defense, or to the President himself, "Be careful." "Don't plunge ahead." Recognize that force has utility, but that utility is actually quite limited. Recognize that when we go to war, almost inevitably, there are going to be unanticipated consequences. And they're not going to be happy ones.

Above all, recognize that, when you go to war, it's unlikely there's a neat tidy solution. It's far more likely that the bill that the nation is going to pay in lives and in dollars is going to be a monumental one. My problem with the generals is that, with certain exceptions, one could name as General Shinseki, with certain exceptions-

BILL MOYERS: Who said, "We are going to need half a million men if we go into Iraq." And-

ANDREW BACEVICH: Right.

BILL MOYERS: -he was shown the door for telling the truth.

ANDREW BACEVICH: By and large, the generals did not speak truth to power.

BILL MOYERS: One of the things that comes through in your book is that great truths are contained in small absurdities. And you use the lowly IED, the improvised explosive device, or roadside bomb, that's taken such a toll of American forces in Iraq, to get at a very powerful truth. Tell me about that.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well war - wars are competitions. The adversary develops capabilities. Your enemy develops capabilities. And you try to develop your own capabilities to check what he can do to you to be able to, overcome his capabilities.

One of the striking things about the Iraq War, and in which we had been fighting against, technologically at least, a relatively backward or primitive adversary, one of the interesting things is they have innovated far more adeptly and quickly than we have.

BILL MOYERS: The insurgents.

ANDREW BACEVICH: The insurgents have. And an example of that is the IED, which began as a very low tech kind of primitive mine. And, over time, became ever more sophisticated, ever more lethal, ever more difficult to detect, ever more difficult to check. And those enhancements in insurgent IED capability continually kept ahead of our ability to innovate and catch up.

BILL MOYERS: And I think you say, in your book, that it costs the price of a pizza to make a roadside bomb?

ANDREW BACEVICH: That's right. Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: This is what our men and women are up against in Afghanistan-

ANDREW BACEVICH: The point is to say that the reality of war is always a heck of a lot more complicated than you might imagine the day before the war begins. And, rather than looking to technology to define the future of warfare, we ought to look - really look at military history.

BILL MOYERS: And what do we learn when we look to the past?

ANDREW BACEVICH: What we should learn from history is that preventive war doesn't work. The Iraq War didn't work. And, therefore, we should abandon notions, such as the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. We should return to the just war tradition. Which sees force as something that is only used as a last resort. Which sees war as something that is justifiable for defensive purposes.

BILL MOYERS: How, then, do we fight what you acknowledge, in the book, is the perfectly real threat posed by violent Islamic extremism?

ANDREW BACEVICH: I think we need to see the threat for what it is. It is a real threat. It's not an existential threat. The 19 hijackers that killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11 didn't succeed because they had advanced technology, because they were particularly smart, because they were ten feet tall.

They succeeded because we let our guard down and we were stupid. We need to recognize that the threat posed by violent Islamic radicalism, by terrorist organizations, al Qaeda, really is akin to a criminal conspiracy, a violent conspiracy, a dangerous conspiracy. But it's a criminal enterprise. And the primary response to a criminal enterprise is policing.

Policing as in organizations like the FBI, intelligence organizations, some special operations forces. That would undertake a concerted campaign to identify and root out and destroy this criminal conspiracy. But that doesn't require invading and occupying countries. Again, one of the big mistakes the Bush Administration made, and it's a mistake we're still paying for, is that the President persuaded us that the best way to prevent another 9/11 is to embark upon a global war. Wrong. The best way to prevent another 9/11 is to organize an intensive international effort to root out and destroy that criminal conspiracy.

BILL MOYERS: You, in fact, say that, instead of a bigger army, we need a smaller more modest foreign policy. One that assigns soldiers missions that are consistent with their capability. "Modesty," I'm quoting you, "requires giving up on the illusions of grandeur to which the end of the Cold War and then 9/11 gave rise. It also means reining in the imperial presidents who expect the army to make good on those illusions." Do you expect either John McCain or Barack Obama to rein in the "imperial presidency?"

ANDREW BACEVICH: No. I mean, people run for the presidency in order to become imperial presidents. The people who are advising these candidates, the people who aspire to be the next national security advisor, the next secretary of defense, these are people who yearn to exercise those kind of great powers.

They're not running to see if they can make the Pentagon smaller. They're not. So when I - as a distant observer of politics - one of the things that both puzzles me and I think troubles me is the 24/7 coverage of the campaign.

Parsing every word, every phrase, that either Senator Obama or Senator McCain utters, as if what they say is going to reveal some profound and important change that was going to come about if they happened to be elected. It's not going to happen.

BILL MOYERS: It's not going to happen because?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Not going to happen - it's not going to happen because the elements of continuity outweigh the elements of change. And it's not going to happen because, ultimately, we the American people, refuse to look in that mirror. And to see the extent to which the problems that we face really lie within.

We refuse to live within our means. We continue to think that the problems that beset the country are out there beyond our borders. And that if we deploy sufficient amount of American power we can fix those problems, and therefore things back here will continue as they have for decades.

BILL MOYERS: I was in the White House, back in the early 60s, and I've been a White House watcher ever since. And I have never come across a more distilled essence of the evolution of the presidency than in just one paragraph in your book.

You say, "Beginning with the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, "the occupant of the White House has become a combination of demigod, father figure and, inevitably, the betrayer of inflated hopes. Pope. Pop star. Scold. Scapegoat. Crisis manager. Commander in Chief. Agenda settler. Moral philosopher. Interpreter of the nation's charisma. Object of veneration. And the butt of jokes. All rolled into one." I would say you nailed the modern presidency.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, and the - I think the troubling part is, because of this preoccupation with, fascination with, the presidency, the President has become what we have instead of genuine politics. Instead of genuine democracy.

We look to the President, to the next President. You know, we know that the current President's a failure and a disappoint - we look to the next President to fix things. And, of course, as long as we have this expectation that the next President is going to fix things then, of course, that lifts all responsibility from me to fix things.

One of the real problems with the imperial presidency, I think, is that it has hollowed out our politics. And, in many respects, has made our democracy a false one. We're going through the motions of a democratic political system. But the fabric of democracy, I think, really has worn very thin.

BILL MOYERS: The other consequence of the imperial presidency, as you point out, is that, for members of the political class, that would include the media that covers the political class, serving, gaining access to, reporting on, second guessing, or gossiping about the imperial president are about those aspiring to succeed him, as in this campaign, has become an abiding preoccupation.

ANDREW BACEVICH: I'm not - my job is not to be a media critic. But, I mean, one - you cannot help but be impressed by the amount of ink spilled on Obama and McCain compared to how little attention is given, for example, to the races in the Senate and the House. Now, one could say perhaps that makes sense, because the Congress has become such a dysfunctional body. But it really does describe a disproportion, I think of attention that is a problem.

BILL MOYERS: Would the imperial presidency exist were it not for the Congress?

ANDREW BACEVICH: No. I think that the imperial presidency would not exist but for the Congress. Because the Congress, since World War II, has thrust power and authority onto the presidency.

BILL MOYERS: Here is what I take to be the core of your analysis of our political crisis. You write, "The United States has become a de facto one party state. With the legislative branch permanently controlled by an incumbent's party. And every President exploiting his role as Commander in Chief to expand on the imperial prerogatives of his office."

ANDREW BACEVICH: One of the great lies about American politics is that Democrats genuinely subscribe to a set of core convictions that make Democrats different from Republicans. And the same thing, of course, applies to the other party. It's not true. I happen to define myself as a conservative.

Well, what do conservatives say they stand for? Well, conservatives say they stand for balanced budgets. Small government. The so called traditional values.

Well, when you look back over the past 30 or so years, since the rise of Ronald Reagan, which we, in many respects, has been a conservative era in American politics, well, did we get small government?

Do we get balanced budgets? Do we get serious as opposed to simply rhetorical attention to traditional social values? The answer's no. Because all of that really has simply been part of a package of tactics that Republicans have employed to get elected and to - and then to stay in office.

BILL MOYERS: And, yet, you say that the prime example of political dysfunction today is the Democratic Party in relation to Iraq.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I may be a conservative, but I can assure you that, in November of 2006, I voted for every Democrat I could possibly come close to. And I did because the Democratic Party, speaking with one voice, at that time, said that, "Elect us. Give us power in the Congress, and we will end the Iraq War."

And the American people, at that point, adamantly tired of this war, gave power to the Democrats in Congress. And they absolutely, totally, completely failed to follow through on their commitment. Now, there was a lot of posturing. But, really, the record of the Democratic Congress over the past two years has been - one in which, substantively, all they have done is to appropriate the additional money that enables President Bush to continue that war.

BILL MOYERS: And you say the promises of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi prove to be empty. Reid and Pelosi's commitment to forcing a change in policy took a backseat to their concern to protect the Democratic majority.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Could anybody disagree with that?

BILL MOYERS: You say, and this is another one of my highlighted sentences, that "Anyone with a conscience sending soldiers back to Iraq or Afghanistan for multiple combat tours, while the rest of the country chills out, can hardly be seen as an acceptable arrangement. It is unfair. Unjust. And morally corrosive." And, yet, that's what we're doing.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Absolutely. And I think - I don't want to talk about my son here.

BILL MOYERS: Your son?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: You dedicate the book to your son.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Yeah. Well, my son was killed in Iraq. And I don't want to talk about that, because it's very personal. But it has long stuck in my craw, this posturing of supporting the troops. I don't want to insult people.

There are many people who say they support the troops, and they really mean it. But when it comes, really, down to understanding what does it mean to support the troops? It needs to mean more than putting a sticker on the back of your car.

I don't think we actually support the troops. We the people. What we the people do is we contract out the business of national security to approximately 0.5 percent of the population. About a million and a half people that are on active duty.

And then we really turn away. We don't want to look when they go back for two or three or four or five combat tours. That's not supporting the troops. That's an abdication of civic responsibility. And I do think it - there's something fundamentally immoral about that.

Again, as I tried to say, I think the global war on terror, as a framework of thinking about policy, is deeply defective. But if one believes in the global war on terror, then why isn't the country actually supporting it? In a meaningful substantive sense?

Where is the country?

BILL MOYERS: Are you calling for a reinstatement of the draft?

ANDREW BACEVICH: I'm not calling for a reinstatement of the draft because I understand that, politically, that's an impossibility. And, to tell you the truth, we don't need to have an army of six or eight or ten million people. But we do need to have the country engaged in what its soldiers are doing. In some way that has meaning. And that simply doesn't exist today.

BILL MOYERS: Well, despite your loss, your and your wife's loss, you say in this powerful book what, to me, is a paradox. You say that, "Ironically, Iraq may yet prove to be the source of our salvation." And help me to understand that.

ANDREW BACEVICH: We're going to have a long argument about the Iraq War. We, Americans. Not unlike the way we had a very long argument about the Vietnam War. In fact, maybe the argument about the Vietnam War continues to the present day. And that argument is going to be - is going to cause us, I hope, to ask serious questions about where this war came from.

How did we come to be a nation in which we really thought that we could transform the greater Middle East with our army?

What have been the costs that have been imposed on this country? Hundreds of billions of dollars. Some projections, two to three trillion dollars. Where is that money coming from? How else could it have been spent? For what? Who bears the burden?

Who died? Who suffered loss? Who's in hospitals? Who's suffering from PTSD? And was it worth it? Now, there will be plenty of people who are going to say, "Absolutely, it was worth it. We overthrew this dictator." But I hope and pray that there will be many others who will make the argument that it wasn't worth it.

It was a fundamental mistake. It never should have been undertaking. And we're never going to do this kind of thing again. And that might be the moment when we look ourselves in the mirror. And we see what we have become. And perhaps undertake an effort to make those changes in the American way of life that will enable us to preserve for future generations that which we value most about the American way of life.

BILL MOYERS: The book is "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism." Andrew J. Bacevich, thank you for being with me.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Thank you very much.

BILL MOYERS: I have to believe that if Barack Obama and John McCain took time to read THE LIMITS OF POWER, this would be a different campaign. The reality just might sober them up.

A personal word if you will at the end of this frenzied and dangerous week. All week I've thought of my father - and his friend in the White House. My father dropped out of the fourth grade and never returned to high school because his family needed him to pick cotton to help ends meet. The Great Depression knocked him down and almost out. He never made more than $100 a week in his working life, and he made that only when he joined the union in the last job he held. He voted for Franklin Delano Roosevelt in four straight elections and would have gone on voting for him until kingdom come if he'd had the chance. When I asked him why, he said, "Because he was my friend."

Now, my father of course never met FDR; no politician ever paid him much note. But when Roosevelt died, my father wept. I puzzled at how it was a struggling young husband and father, lucky enough to get a job as a day laborer on the highway to Oklahoma City, could believe that the patrician in the White House knew what life was like for people like him.

Then, one day, years later, listening to a compilation of Franklin Roosevelt's speeches, I understood. Listen, and I think you will understand too. Remember, it's 1933-- chaos has descended across the country. Millions are out of work, their savings gone, their pantries empty, and a quarter of the banks are closed. Everything that's tied down is coming loose. And there on the banks of the Red River a young couple with one son and about to have another, sat listening to the radio, listening to the new president being sworn into office, listening to this:

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT: In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties…a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence and an equally great number toil with little return…Yes, the money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths.

This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly…let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself…

BILL MOYERS: And so my father took heart. No false promises. No passing the buck. No pandering. Just a simple truth: when the new president said we can do this, my father knew he was included. He never forgot it, never stopped believing his friend in the White House believed in him.

That's it for the JOURNAL.

Before we go, I want to call your attention to a special broadcast scheduled to air on many of these PBS stations next week, as part of the series, "POV." "Critical Condition" is the powerful story of four patients struggling to survive, to survive not only illness but America's failing health care system, where treatment is all too often delayed or denied.

WOMAN: A lot of people are dying, and they're dying because they don't have health care.

I'm Bill Moyers. We'll see you next week.

[Aug 15, 2008] Andrew Bacevich, America and the World by Michael Winship

August 15, 2008 | t r u t h o u t

During an interview on Bill Moyers this week, Andrew Bacevich, retired Army colonel and author of "The Limits of Power," said, "There is nothing in the Preamble to the Constitution which defines the purpose of the United States of America as remaking the world in our image, which I view as a fool's errand. (Photo/Illustration: Damien Donck / Newsweek)

In a letter written in 1648, Swedish statesman Axel Oxenstierna, chancellor to both King Gustavus Adolphus and Queen Christina, counseled, "Know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed."

The fighting between Russia and the former Soviet republic of Georgia is an unnerving reminder of that, and of how quickly the balance of global power can be tilted from unexpected directions with barely a warning.

Some hawks and neo-cons called for NATO intervention or even suggested we send in Stinger missiles or the 82nd Airborne as a peacekeeping force. President Bush warned, "Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century."

Perhaps, but the reality of the early 21st century is that, in the short run, at least, the president's words ring hollow. In spite of past promises of support to Georgia, Russia is key to our efforts in the Middle East and our European allies are dependent on Russia for energy. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have both our military strength and our international credibility stretched perilously thin at a time when oil-rich Russia is reemerging as a superpower. We've boxed ourselves in.

It was in that light that I came upon the Oxenstierna quote the other night, while re-reading the late historian Barbara Tuchman's "The March of Folly," a knowing compendium, from ancient Troy to Vietnam, of the ways in which, given half a chance, those in power will steer their ships of state straight into the rocks. In the first chapter, she also quotes American President John Adams: "While all other sciences have advanced" - you can almost hear him sighing - "government is at a stand; little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago."

Andrew J. Bacevich probably would agree with all of the above. The retired Army colonel, a West Point graduate, teaches history and international relations at Boston University. His latest book, "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism," explores our nation's current predicament, not just on the world stage, but here at home as well. He spoke with my colleague, Bill Moyers, on this week's edition of the PBS series, Bill Moyers Journal.

Bacevich speaks truth to power, no matter who's in power, which may be why those of both the left and right are eager to hear his views. Perhaps it's also because when he challenges American myths and illusions, he does so from a genuine patriotism forged in the fire of his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam and the death a year ago of his son, an Army lieutenant in Iraq. "The Limits of Power" is dedicated to the young man, but the senior Bacevich, a man of quiet, solid gravitas, holds his grief privately between himself and his family.

"Our foreign policy is something that is concocted in Washington, DC, but it reflects the perceptions of our political elite about what we the people want," he told Moyers. "And what we want, by and large is ... this continuing flow of very cheap consumer goods. We want to be able to pump gas into our cars regardless of how big they may happen to be. And we want to be able to do these things without having to think about whether or not the books are balanced at the end of the month, or the end of the fiscal year."

To that end, he says, "One of the ways we avoid confronting our refusal to balance the books is to rely increasingly on the projection of American military power around the world to try to maintain this dysfunctional system or set of arrangements that have evolved over the last 30 or 40 years."

"... I think historians a hundred years from now will puzzle over how it could be that the United States of America, the most powerful nation in the world, as far back as the early 1970's came to recognize that dependence on foreign oil was a problem, posed a threat, compromised our freedom of action. How every president from Richard Nixon down ... declared, 'We're going to fix the problem.' [But] none of them did."

He continued, "The clearest statement of what I value is found in the Preamble to the Constitution. There is nothing in the Preamble to the Constitution which defines the purpose of the United States of America as remaking the world in our image, which I view as a fool's errand. I believe that the framers of the Constitution were primarily concerned with focusing on the way we live here, the way we order our affairs. To try to ensure that as individuals, we can have an opportunity to pursue our, perhaps, differing definitions of freedom, but also so that, as a community, we could live together in some kind of harmony. And that future generations would also be able to share in those same opportunities.... With the current crisis in American foreign policy, unless we do change our ways, the likelihood that our children, our grandchildren, the next generation will enjoy the opportunities that we've had is very slight because we're squandering our power. We are squandering our wealth."

Bacevich believes, "The Congress, especially with regard to matters related to national security policy, has thrust power and authority to the executive branch. We have created an imperial presidency. The Congress no longer is able to articulate a vision of what is the common good. The Congress exists primarily to ensure the reelection of members of Congress."

That imperial presidency, he says, "has made our democracy a false one. We're going through the motions of a democratic political system. But the fabric of democracy, I think, really has worn very thin."

Iraq, Bacevich concludes, "was a fundamental mistake. It never should have been undertaken. And we're never going to do this kind of thing again." This might, he thinks, "be the moment when we look ourselves in the mirror [and] ... see what we have become. And perhaps undertake an effort to make those changes in the American way of life that will enable us to preserve for future generations that which we value most about the American way of life."

Andrew Bacevich's words should echo down the corridors of Congress and the halls of the White House, no matter who becomes our next president.

The Limits of Power: Andrew Bacevich on the End of American Exceptionalism

Andrew Bacevich is a conservative historian who spent twenty-three years serving in the US Army. He also lost his son in Iraq last year. In a new book titled The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, Bacevich argues that although many in this country are paying a heavy price for US domestic and foreign policy decisions, millions of Americans simply continue to shop, spend and satisfy their appetite for cheap oil, credit and the promise of freedom at home. Bacevich writes, "As the American appetite for freedom has grown, so too has our penchant for empire." [includes rush transcript]

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Guest:

Andrew Bacevich, Retired colonel who spent twenty-three years in the US Army. He is professor of history and international relations at Boston University and writes for a wide spectrum of publications including The Nation, Foreign Affairs, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative. He became a staunch critic of the Iraq war and Bush's foreign policy and is the author of several books, including The New American Militarism. His latest book is called The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.

Rush Transcript

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AMY GOODMAN: Our next guest is Andrew Bacevich. He's a conservative historian. He spent twenty-three years serving in the US Army. He also lost his son in Iraq. Andrew Bacevich writes, "In joining the Army, my son was following in his father's footsteps: Before he was born, I had served in Vietnam. As military officers, we shared an ironic kinship of sorts, each of us demonstrating a peculiar knack for picking the wrong war at the wrong time."

Andrew Bacevich holds both parties accountable for the Iraq war. As he writes, "To be fair, responsibility for the war's continuation now rests no less with the Democrats who control Congress than with the president and his party. After my son's death, my state's senators, Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, telephoned to express their condolences. Stephen F. Lynch, our congressman, attended my son's wake. Kerry was present for the funeral Mass. My family and I greatly appreciated such gestures. But when I suggested to each of them the necessity of ending the war, I got the brushoff." Bacevich goes on to write, "To whom do Kennedy, Kerry and Lynch listen? We know the answer: to the same people who have the ear of George W. Bush and Karl Rove-namely, wealthy individuals and institutions."

Andrew Bacevich has just published a new book. It's called The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. He joins me here in the firehouse studio.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Professor Bacevich.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Thank you very much for having me.

AMY GOODMAN: How hard was it to write this book after your son's death? This is not theoretical for you.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I try not to talk about my son's death, because it's a private matter, and to tell you the truth, I don't want to do anything that even looks like it might be exploiting his memory. I would say that I imagine that some of the energy that informed the writing a book came from the emotional response to my son's death. But the content, the critique, is unrelated to that tragedy.

The content of the book very much reflects my dismay at the direction of US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. There's a lot in the book that tries to hold the Bush administration accountable for recent events, but I would not for a second want to suggest that the crisis in which we find ourselves today ought to be laid simply at the foot of the Bush administration or the Republican Party, because it's been a long time coming.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean by "exceptionalism"?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, this is not an idea that's original with me. It's clear that from the founding of the Anglo-American colonies, from the time that John Winthrop made his famous sermon and declared that "we shall be as a city upon a hill" a light to the world-it's clear that, from the outset, there has been a strong sense among Americans that we are a special people with a providential mission.

In the twentieth century, probably going back to roughly the time of Woodrow Wilson, certainly since the end of the Cold War, this concept of a providential mission, a responsibility to the world, has translated into a sense of empowerment or prerogative to determine the way the world is supposed to work, what it's supposed to look like, and also, over the last twenty years or so, an increasing willingness to use military force to cause the world to look the way we want it to look. And I think that that expression of American exceptionalism is one that's not only utterly false, but is greatly at odds with own interests as a country.

AMY GOODMAN: You write, "Recalling how Washington saw the post-Cold War world and America's place in or atop it helps us understand why policymakers failed to anticipate, deter or deflect the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001."

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I mean-–and again, this is very much not something that one would lay at the foot of the Bush administration, but you recall that at the end of the Cold War, when history had supposedly ended, when globalization, which really was a synonym for Americanization, was thought to be sweeping the world and creating a new order, when Democrats and Republicans alike declared with great confidence that not only was the US the sole superpower, but that the US possessed military might such as the world had never seen, well, an attack on Manhattan killing 3,000 Americans wasn't something that was supposed to happen.

So the focus in the '90s in the Clinton era and the focus into the first nine months we saw of the Bush era was very much out there somewhere, you know, where we were going to sort out the problems of the world. Nobody was paying attention to the possibility of actually having to defend the United States of America. So, there we were, spending on defense-well, "defense" in quotes-defending on our military probably as much as the rest of the world was spending on their militaries, and yet our military simply wasn't prepared to perform what ought to be its primary mission, and that is defending the people of the United States of America.

AMY GOODMAN: You say the Department of Defense didn't actually do defense. It was prepared-it specialized in power projection.

ANDREW BACEVICH: It still doesn't do defense. I mean, it is a remarkable thing, I think, that the reflexive response to 9/11 is, first of all, to create a new bureaucratic entity that supposedly does defend the country-that's the Department of Homeland Security, as we call it-but to continue to see the purpose of the Department of Defense, so-called, as power projection.

So, what has the Department of Defense been doing for the last seven years since 9/11? Well, been fighting a war in-where? Afghanistan. And a second one in Iraq. Now, I think you can make the case for Afghanistan, at least in terms of you can make a case for the necessity of holding the Taliban accountable for having given sanctuary to al-Qaeda. You can't make any case for the invasion of Iraq as related to the global war on terror. And frankly, it's becoming rather difficult, I think, to make a case for the continuation of the Afghanistan war as part of the global war on terror.

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I mean, you identified me as a conservative, and I don't deny that label, but I think in this particular context what conservatism means is to be realistic in understanding how the world works and being respectful of history and taking care not to overstate one's own capacity to influence events.

And I think, in that regard, if we look at Afghanistan today, we have to see a country that historically, at least as I understand Afghan history, has never really functioned as an integrated and coherent nation state. It's never been ruled from Kabul. It's always been ruled from the-in the provinces by people you might call tribal chiefs. You might call them warlords, you can call them local bosses, but authority has been widely distributed. But we are engaged in a project in which we insist that we're going to transform Afghanistan into something more or less like a modern, coherent nation state, and indeed, we insist that it has to conform to our notions of liberal democracy.

Were we able to actually do that, I think it would be a wonderful thing. But seven years or so into this project, I'm not sure we can do it. Matter of fact, I'm increasingly persuaded that we can't do it, and therefore-and I think in your news summary you made reference to this-you know, for somebody like Senator Obama to say, "Elect me. I'll win the global war on terror by sending more troops to Afghanistan," I think ought to give people pause and, frankly, ought to cause them to wonder how much change an Obama administration would make with regard to a foreign policy. That's not an argument for voting for McCain, by a long shot, but it suggests the narrowness of the debate over foreign policy.

AMY GOODMAN: So how is this narrowness taking place? I mean, yes, you have McCain saying we'll be in Iraq for a hundred years. You have Obama speaking out against the war, but he votes with McCain for funding for the war all through the years -

ANDREW BACEVICH: Right, right, right.

AMY GOODMAN: -as a senator, and then he says we'll send thousands more, we should send thousands more troops to Afghanistan.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Right, right. I think there are differences between the two, but I think we should see the differences as differences in operational priorities. McCain insists that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror and that it must be won, and it's clear that if we, the American people, elect him, that we will be engaged in Iraq for a long, long time. Senator Obama says, "No, Afghanistan is the central front in the global war on terror. Elect me and will shift our military effort to Afghanistan." It's a difference, but it's a difference in operational priorities; it's not a difference in strategy.

Both of them-McCain explicitly, I think Obama implicitly-endorse the notion that a global war on terror really provides the right frame for thinking about US national security policy going forward. A real debate would be one in which we would have one candidate, and certainly it would be McCain, arguing for the global war on terror and an opponent who was questioning whether the global war on terror makes sense. I don't think it makes sense.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about this, the global war on terror.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I mean, the phrase itself is one that really ought to cause people to have their heads snap back a little bit, because President Bush and others around him-Rumsfeld was certainly very clear on this-it's a war, it's global, and how long is it going to go on? Well, they said from the outset it's going to go on for decades. In the Pentagon, there's a phrase that gets used, "generational war," a war that lasts a generation or more.

Well, we need to ask ourselves whether that really makes sense? What are the costs entailed by waging war for a generation? Where does the money come from? What are we not doing because we're spending all this money on war? And in a very human sense, who actually pays the cost? I mean, who serves? Who doesn't serve? Whose social needs are getting met, and whose are not getting met, as a consequence of having open-ended global war be this national priority?

It seems to me that were we to accurately gauge the actually existing threat-and there is a threat. I mean, 9/11 happened. There are people out there who want to kill us. But were we to actually gauge that threat in a realistic way, we would see that open-ended global war is not only unnecessary, but it's probably counterproductive, that there are better ways to go about keeping us secure than to engage in global war.

AMY GOODMAN: And I want to talk about those ways after break. We're talking to Andrew Bacevich, a retired colonel, spent twenty-three years in the US Army, now a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. He's just written the book The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Professor Andrew Bacevich, retired colonel who spent twenty-three years in the US Army, now a professor at Boston University. And his latest book is The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.

Could you talk about the cost of war and how the militarists learned from your war, from Vietnam, how we are insulated from the true cost?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Yeah, this is not something people intended to happen, but it's an unintended consequence that we today really need to intend to. This is the way I would tell the story. President Nixon ends the draft and creates the so-called all-volunteer force, which really is a professional army. When Nixon ends the draft, he doesn't do it because he thinks having a professional army would be in the nation's interest. What Nixon is trying to do is to basically cut the antiwar movement off at the knees, and his calculation was that by ending the draft, kids would get out of the streets and go back to class. And to some degree, he actually was right. It's worth remembering that the JCS at the time, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were opposed to ending the draft, because they felt that they could never find enough volunteers to fill the force.

By the time we get into the 1980s, those JCS concerns have been proven incorrect, and we do end up with, I think, a magnificent professional army. In terms of what you want an army to be like and to do, they are competent, they are disciplined, they know their business. Alas, after the end of the Cold War, we have a political elite-and again, I would emphasize both parties-who decide that, gosh, with this great army we have, shouldn't we go find some use for it? And the post-Cold War period, beginning with the elder Bush, sees this pattern of interventionism-you know, Panama, Iraq, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, on and on and on-mostly small conflicts, mostly brief conflicts, conflicts in which we, the people, sit on the sidelines and mostly applaud, and the all-volunteer force seems like the most successful federal program of the recent decades. Until you get to Iraq, because Iraq turns out to be not a short war, not a clean war, protracted, ugly, rightfully, I think, controversial and unpopular.

But what we have found is that we, the people, have so distanced ourselves from the professional army that unless you have a family member serving in uniform-and most people don't-you don't know where this military is, you don't know what it's like, and you really don't have much say in the way it's used.

President Bush exploits that after 9/11. He decides he knows how it wants to be used. And, of course, for the first time in our history, when we go to war, instead of a president turning to the Congress and turning to the country and say, "We're going to have to change the way we do business, because we're at war," President Bush actually says, "Go to Disney World. Go shopping. Go back to doing what you have been doing for the last ten years, and I'll take care of everything." And I have to say, the great majority of the American people-I don't think listeners of your show or of yours or your show-but the great majority of the American people basically did what Bush said and in tuned the war out and allowed the burden to fall on a very small percentage of the population, which I find, frankly, morally objectionable.

AMY GOODMAN: Who benefits, Andrew Bacevich?

ANDREW BACEVICH: From the war? There are obviously corporations, contractors who benefit, and I would not-never want to dismiss that, but I don't really think that that provides us an adequate explanation of how we got into this fix. I think who really benefits or what benefits is the political status quo. The national security state, the apparatus of the national security state benefits. It's gotten larger since 9/11, immensely larger. The tacit bargain between our political leaders and the American people, which basically assumes that our culture of consumption, our refusal to save, our addiction to oil, as President Bush himself described it, that all of these things can be sustained indefinitely, if we can simply employ our military power in ways to shape the world to our liking.

Now, of course, what we found over the past five, six years is, our military power is really not nearly as great as many people imagined it to be back in the 1990s, and war has not become an effective instrument of politics, as many people imagined back in the 1990s.

AMY GOODMAN: You talk about massive amounts of money that go into the military, and yet it can be stopped by an IED.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, it's an interesting thing. I mean, the military's self-image, or the image of the military that many national security experts had developed during the 1990s, was that because our military was so adept at exploiting information technology, that in every respect we were faster than any prospective opponent: we could think faster, we could decide faster, we could see faster, we could use our weapons faster.

One of the great ironies, I think, of the Iraq war is that our adversary, who in a technological sense, we would say, has been fairly primitive, our adversary has actually acted much more quickly than we have. In the competition between the improvised explosive devices as a major weapons system that they have used and our efforts to defeat that system, they have repeatedly acted more quickly than we have. And there's an important lesson there, I think. And the lesson is, technology is not all it's cracked up to be when it comes to military affairs.

AMY GOODMAN: The first meeting of Barack Obama and McCain was with an evangelical reverend, Rick Warren, in California, and they talked about evil and good, and they talked. And McCain said he will go to the gates of Hell and back to get Osama bin Laden. Your thoughts?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I'm a conservative, and this is another one of those things that leads me to believe that not only is President Bush not a conservative, but Senator McCain is not, either.

Of course there is evil in the world and there is good in the world, but guess what? Some of the evil is right here. I mean, to view international politics through this lens of good and evil leads you to vastly oversimplify and I think also leads you to make reckless decisions. Bush's-I do believe President Bush genuinely-not cynically, genuinely-saw Saddam Hussein as evil, and I think he actually genuinely believes that-again, consistent with this notion of American exceptionalism-that we were called upon to bring democracy to Iraq. But what a ludicrous way to view US-Iraqi relations over the past twenty or thirty years, because if you really look at US-Iraqi relations or US policy in the Middle East over the last twenty, thirty, fifty, sixty years, it's impossible to see the question as simply one of good versus evil. It's not black and white; it's grey. And you need to see the world as grey if you're going to be a sensible statesman.

AMY GOODMAN: Where do you see all this heading? Your last chapter is "The Limits of Power." Why don't people on the ground, overwhelmingly opposed to the war, have a say now?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I think we have. Again, I don't mean to make this as a statement that applies to 100 percent of the American people, but I think the great majority of us basically have allowed ourselves to become seduced by this culture of consumption, of not taking seriously the notion that someday the bills come due, that you can't simply run up a line of credit that stretches from here to infinity. We don't want to look ourselves in the mirror. We don't want to recognize the need to make some changes in the way we live.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you see the end of American empire?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Yes, I do. And I think the key question is, will the American empire end catastrophically because of our blind insistence that we will not change? Or will we be able to disengage ourselves from and dismantle the American empire in a sensible, reasonable way that will do the least damage to the world and the least damage to ourselves?

AMY GOODMAN: Andrew Bacevich, I want to thank you very much for being with us. His book is The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.

Let Them Eat Cake By Karen Kwiatkowski

September 10, 2008

Andrew Bacevich, retired Army Colonel and Professor at Boston College, is a traditional conservative. His good advice regarding our contemporary foreign policy, like that of the late Lt. General William Odom, fell on deaf ears in both Washington and in the so-called "conservative" heartland.

Bacevich and Odom were consistent and correct in advising a somewhat constitutional and certainly more prudent foreign policy than Washington has pursued for some decades. Because they are conservative, they sought to make sense, to connect what we are doing today in Iraq and Afghanistan to an American tradition that, perhaps, has simply gone awry.

I found it interesting that in an American Conservative excerpt from his new book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, Bacevich refers to our "occupation" of Afghanistan. Not a lot of people are referring to Afghanistan as an occupied country, but it is.

The indications were there early on, with the US-selected puppet governor crowned December 2001, and the reluctance and minority of NATO troops vis–vis American troops (28,000 and counting). As with all occupations over time, instead of a pacified group, or groups, we see strengthening and growing sophistication in the national and local resistance to the occupation.

As noted by Australian journalist John Pilger, in 2003 with his documentary "Breaking the Silence" and more recently this year, what we are doing in Afghanistan has the trappings of vicious total domination, and it frankly doesn't seem to be doing the already impoverished Afghans much good. Almost a year ago, 60 Minutes did a segment on Afghanistan, where the narrator tut-tutted when an Afghan observed, "We used to hate the Russians much more than Americans. But now when we see all this happening, I am telling you Russians behave much better than the Americans."

That October 2007 broadcast was about recent inadvertent killing of civilians by air strikes. What changed in eleven months? The mass murder by air and land of Afghan civilians, including women and children, continues. It's not only the U.S. military doing the killing, of course. But none of that murder of innocents would be happening, or would have happened, had Washington not, as Pilger and others have observed, first planned to invade and then moved to base-build in, and occupy, Afghanistan.

In a sheer quantitative sense, the United States has long since avenged 9-11, racking up hundreds of thousands of dead, wounded, and scarred innocents. It has long since avenged 9-11 in sheer destruction, laying waste to cities, villages, homes and hearths, industry, government and religious observance. The destruction and murder is now habitual, profligate and self-indulgent. To the world, the President of the United States - present and future - is an uncouth and supersized version of Marie Antoinette.

In the most recent Afghan outcry over the death of innocent men, women, and children - the American military spokeswoman Lt Col Rumi Nielson-Green had this to say: "Soldiers treated wounded people at the scene, which indicated that the Laws of Armed Conflict were followed."

How very nice for them. Laws of armed conflict? Is there possibly a way for a state to conduct war that is traditional, lawful, good? The three main principles of the LOAC - military necessity, distinction, and proportionality - provide a clue.

Military necessity relates to those acts needed to achieve a military objective, or win a battle, and no more. Distinction means not targeting, and being careful not to inadvertently damage civilians and civilian property. Proportionality prohibits the use of any force that exceeds that needed to accomplish the military objective. Sounds fair, but in the context of occupying Afghanistan (or any occupation), is following the laws of armed conflict even possible?

Notwithstanding the military spokeswoman's allegations of soldierly medical care for blown up babies, the LOAC cannot honestly be observed in military occupations. Ever.

Odom and Bacevich have described our foreign policy and security challenges as evolving recently, mid-20th century, and their writings indicate that there may be a way, or at least a hope, for our military empire to be benign. In this, they are conservative in the sense that Joe Biden and John McCain are conservative.

In 1963, looking at libertarian solutions for war and defense, Murray Rothbard wrote, "For it is precisely the characteristic of modern weapons that they cannot be used selectively, cannot be used in a libertarian manner. Therefore, their very existence must be condemned…." In "War, Peace, and the State," Rothbard addresses primarily nuclear weapons, but makes clear that the indiscriminate nature of conventional weapons, for the same reason, renders their use unacceptable, immoral and wrong.

But without these weapons, how would we fight our war in Afghanistan, occupy that country, and counter the nationalists, the tribalists, the Taliban, the hundreds of families and thousands of sons and daughters, wives and husbands each seeking their own vengeance, each asserting their existence as angry and powerful people, not faceless collateral damage?

Of course, we could not fight such a war, and we should not. Sadly, the government and the American demos believe freedom and prosperity, our own and that of others, can and ought to be produced by force. This belief is anti-American, un-conservative, and logically flawed. It is wrongheaded, and it is the foreign policy and heartfelt ideology of both major presidential candidates.

As American occupations bring suffering - untold and denied, unmeasured so as to be deniable - Washington cannot understand why the occupied do not simply submit. Whether it is cake, or brioche, or the heavy American porridge of bristling state socialism and angry imperialism, the Bush-Obama-McCain answer to heartbroken Afghans and to the world, is "Eat it!"

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, has written on defense issues with a libertarian perspective for MilitaryWeek.com, hosted the call-in radio show American Forum, and blogs occasionally for Huffingtonpost.com and Liberty and Power. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here.

The American Conservative -- The Right Choice

The conservative case for Barack Obama

By Andrew J. Bacevich

Barack Obama is no conservative. Yet if he wins the Democratic nomination, come November principled conservatives may well find themselves voting for the senator from Illinois. Given the alternatives-and the state of the conservative movement-they could do worse.

Granted, when it comes to defining exactly what authentic conservatism entails, considerable disagreement exists even (or especially) among conservatives themselves. My own definition emphasizes the following:

Accept that definition and it quickly becomes apparent that the Republican Party does not represent conservative principles. The conservative ascendancy that began with the election of Ronald Reagan has been largely an illusion. During the period since 1980, certain faux conservatives-especially those in the service of Big Business and Big Empire-have prospered. But conservatism as such has not.

The presidency of George W. Bush illustrates the point. In 2001, President Bush took command of a massive, inefficient federal bureaucracy. Since then, he has substantially increased the size of that apparatus, which during his tenure has displayed breathtaking ineptitude both at home and abroad. Over the course of Bush's two terms in office, federal spending has increased 50 percent to $3 trillion per year. Disregarding any obligation to balance the budget, Bush has allowed the national debt to balloon from $5.7 to $9.4 trillion. Worse, under the guise of keeping Americans "safe," he has arrogated to the executive branch unprecedented powers, thereby subverting the Constitution. Whatever else may be said about this record of achievement, it does not accord with conservative principles.

As with every Republican leader since Reagan, President Bush has routinely expressed his support for traditional values. He portrays himself as pro-life and pro-family. He offers testimonials to old-fashioned civic virtues. Yet apart from sporting an American flag lapel-pin, he has done little to promote these values. If anything, the reverse is true. In the defining moment of his presidency, rather than summoning Americans to rally to their country, he validated conspicuous consumption as the core function of 21st-century citizenship.

Should conservatives hold President Bush accountable for the nation's cultural crisis? Of course not. The pursuit of instant gratification, the compulsion to accumulate, and the exaltation of celebrity that have become central to the American way of life predate this administration and derive from forces that lie far beyond the control of any president. Yet conservatives should fault the president and his party for pretending that they are seriously committed to curbing or reversing such tendencies. They might also blame themselves for failing to see the GOP's cultural agenda as contrived and cynical.

Finally, there is President Bush's misguided approach to foreign policy, based on expectations of deploying American military might to eliminate tyranny, transform the Greater Middle East, and expunge evil from the face of the earth. The result has been the very inverse of conservatism. For Bush, in the wake of 9/11, ideology supplanted statecraft. As a result, his administration has squandered American lives and treasure in the pursuit of objectives that make little strategic sense.

For conservatives to hope the election of yet another Republican will set things right is surely in vain. To believe that President John McCain will reduce the scope and intrusiveness of federal authority, cut the imperial presidency down to size, and put the government on a pay-as-you-go basis is to succumb to a great delusion. The Republican establishment may maintain the pretense of opposing Big Government, but pretense it is.

Social conservatives counting on McCain to return the nation to the path of righteousness are kidding themselves. Within this camp, abortion has long been the flagship issue. Yet only a naïf would believe that today's Republican Party has any real interest in overturning Roe v. Wade or that doing so now would contribute in any meaningful way to the restoration of "family values." GOP support for such values is akin to the Democratic Party's professed devotion to the "working poor": each is a ploy to get votes, trotted out seasonally, quickly forgotten once the polls close.

Above all, conservatives who think that a McCain presidency would restore a sense of realism and prudence to U.S. foreign policy are setting themselves up for disappointment. On this score, we should take the senator at his word: his commitment to continuing the most disastrous of President Bush's misadventures is irrevocable. McCain is determined to remain in Iraq as long as it takes. He is the candidate of the War Party. The election of John McCain would provide a new lease on life to American militarism, while perpetuating the U.S. penchant for global interventionism marketed under the guise of liberation.

The essential point is this: conservatives intent on voting in November for a candidate who shares their views might as well plan on spending Election Day at home. The Republican Party of Bush, Cheney, and McCain no longer accommodates such a candidate.

So why consider Obama? For one reason only: because this liberal Democrat has promised to end the U.S. combat role in Iraq. Contained within that promise, if fulfilled, lies some modest prospect of a conservative revival.

To appreciate that possibility requires seeing the Iraq War in perspective. As an episode in modern military history, Iraq qualifies at best as a very small war. Yet the ripples from this small war will extend far into the future, with remembrance of the event likely to have greater significance than the event itself. How Americans choose to incorporate Iraq into the nation's historical narrative will either affirm our post-Cold War trajectory toward empire or create opportunities to set a saner course.

The neoconservatives understand this. If history renders a negative verdict on Iraq, that judgment will discredit the doctrine of preventive war. The "freedom agenda" will command as much authority as the domino theory. Advocates of "World War IV" will be treated with the derision they deserve. The claim that open-ended "global war" offers the proper antidote to Islamic radicalism will become subject to long overdue reconsideration.

Give the neocons this much: they appreciate the stakes. This explains the intensity with which they proclaim that, even with the fighting in Iraq entering its sixth year, we are now "winning"-as if war were an athletic contest in which nothing matters except the final score. The neoconservatives brazenly ignore or minimize all that we have flung away in lives, dollars, political influence, moral standing, and lost opportunities. They have to: once acknowledged, those costs make the folly of the entire neoconservative project apparent. All those confident manifestos calling for the United States to liberate the world's oppressed, exercise benign global hegemony, and extend forever the "unipolar moment" end up getting filed under dumb ideas.

Yet history's judgment of the Iraq War will affect matters well beyond the realm of foreign policy. As was true over 40 years ago when the issue was Vietnam, how we remember Iraq will have large political and even cultural implications.

As part of the larger global war on terrorism, Iraq has provided a pretext for expanding further the already bloated prerogatives of the presidency. To see the Iraq War as anything but misguided, unnecessary, and an abject failure is to play into the hands of the fear-mongers who insist that when it comes to national security all Americans (members of Congress included) should defer to the judgment of the executive branch. Only the president, we are told, can "keep us safe." Seeing the war as the debacle it has become refutes that notion and provides a first step toward restoring a semblance of balance among the three branches of government.

Above all, there is this: the Iraq War represents the ultimate manifestation of the American expectation that the exercise of power abroad offers a corrective to whatever ailments afflict us at home. Rather than setting our own house in order, we insist on the world accommodating itself to our requirements. The problem is not that we are profligate or self-absorbed; it is that others are obstinate and bigoted. Therefore, they must change so that our own habits will remain beyond scrutiny.

Of all the obstacles to a revival of genuine conservatism, this absence of self-awareness constitutes the greatest. As long as we refuse to see ourselves as we really are, the status quo will persist, and conservative values will continue to be marginalized. Here, too, recognition that the Iraq War has been a fool's errand-that cheap oil, the essential lubricant of the American way of life, is gone for good-may have a salutary effect. Acknowledging failure just might open the door to self-reflection.

None of these concerns number among those that inspired Barack Obama's run for the White House. When it comes to foreign policy, Obama's habit of spouting internationalist bromides suggests little affinity for serious realism. His views are those of a conventional liberal. Nor has Obama expressed any interest in shrinking the presidency to its pre-imperial proportions. He does not cite Calvin Coolidge among his role models. And however inspiring, Obama's speeches are unlikely to make much of a dent in the culture. The next generation will continue to take its cues from Hollywood rather than from the Oval Office.

Yet if Obama does become the nation's 44th president, his election will constitute something approaching a definitive judgment of the Iraq War. As such, his ascent to the presidency will implicitly call into question the habits and expectations that propelled the United States into that war in the first place. Matters hitherto consigned to the political margin will become subject to close examination. Here, rather than in Obama's age or race, lies the possibility of his being a truly transformative presidency.

Whether conservatives will be able to seize the opportunities created by his ascent remains to be seen. Theirs will not be the only ideas on offer. A repudiation of the Iraq War and all that it signifies will rejuvenate the far Left as well. In the ensuing clash of visions, there is no guaranteeing that the conservative critique will prevail.

But this much we can say for certain: electing John McCain guarantees the perpetuation of war. The nation's heedless march toward empire will continue. So, too, inevitably, will its embrace of Leviathan. Whether snoozing in front of their TVs or cheering on the troops, the American people will remain oblivious to the fate that awaits them.

For conservatives, Obama represents a sliver of hope. McCain represents none at all. The choice turns out to be an easy one.

_________________________________

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His next book, The Limits of Power, will be published in August.

[May 25, 2006] DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA

Asia Times

Tom Engelhardt interviews Andrew Bacevich

I wait for him on a quiet, tree and wisteria-lined street of red-brick buildings. Students, some in short-sleeves on this still crisp spring morning, stream by. I'm seated on cold, stone steps next to a sign announcing the Boston University Department of International Relations.

He turns the corner and advances, wearing a blue blazer, blue shirt and tie, and khaki slacks and carrying a computer in a black bag. He's white haired, has a nicely weathered face, and the squared shoulders and upright bearing of a man, born in Normal, Illinois, who attended West Point, fought in the Vietnam War, and then had a 20-year military career that ended in 1992.

Now a professor of history at Boston University, he directs me to a spacious, airy office whose floor-to-ceiling windows look out on the picturesque street. A tasseled cap and gown hang on a hook behind the door - perhaps because another year of graduation is not far off. I'm left briefly to wait while he deals with an anxious student, there to discuss his semester mark. Soon enough though, he seats himself behind a large desk with a cup of coffee and prepares to discuss his subjects of choice, American militarism and the American imperial mission.

Andrew Bacevich is a man on a journey - as he himself is the first to admit. A cultural conservative, a former contributor to such magazines as the Weekly Standard and the National Review, a former Bush Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, he discovered some time in the 1990s that his potential conservative allies on foreign policy had fallen in love with the idea of the American military and its imagined awesome power to change the world. They had jumped the tracks and left him behind. A professed cold warrior, in those years he took a new look at our American past - and he's not stopped looking, or reconsidering, since.

What he discovered was the American empire, which became the title of a book he published in 2002. In 2005, his fierce, insightful book on American dreams of global military supremacy, The New American Militarism, How Americans Are Seduced by War, appeared. It would have been eye-opening no matter who had written it, but given his background it was striking indeed.

Forceful and engaged (as well as engaging), Bacevich throws himself into the topic at hand. He has a barely suppressed dramatic streak and a willingness to laugh heartily at himself. But most striking are the questions that stop him. Just as you imagine a scholar should, he visibly turns over your questions in his mind, thinking about what may be new in them.

He takes a sip of coffee and, in a no-nonsense manner, suggests that we begin.

Tomdispatch: In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, you said the revolt of the retired generals against Secretary of Defense [Donald] Rumsfeld represented the beginning of a search for a scapegoat for the Iraq War. I wondered whether you also considered it a preemptive strike against the Bush administration's future Iran policy.

Andrew Bacevich: The answer is yes. It's both really. Certainly, it's become incontrovertible that the Iraq War is not going to end happily. Even if we manage to extricate ourselves and some sort of stable Iraq emerges from the present chaos, arguing that the war lived up to the expectations of the Bush administration is going to be very difficult. My own sense is that the officer corps - and this probably reflects my personal experience to a great degree - is fixated on Vietnam and still believes the military was hung out to dry there.

The officer corps came out of the Vietnam War determined never to repeat that experience and some officers are now angry to discover that the army is once again stuck in a quagmire. So we are in the early stages of a long argument about who is to be blamed for the Iraq debacle. I think, to some degree, the revolt of the generals reflects an effort on the part of senior military officers to weigh in, to lay out the military's case. And the military's case is: We're not at fault. They are; and, more specifically, he is - with Rumsfeld being the stand-in for [Vietnam-era secretary of defense] Robert McNamara.

Having said that, with all the speculation about the Bush administration's interest in expanding the "global war on terror" to include Iran, I suspect the officer corps, already seeing the military badly overstretched, doesn't want to have any part of such a war. Going public with attacks on Rumsfeld is one way of trying to slow whatever momentum there is toward an Iran war.

I must say, I don't really think we're on a track to have a war with Iran any time soon - maybe I'm too optimistic here [he laughs] - but I suspect even the civilian hawks understand that the United States is already overcommitted, that to expand the war on terror to a new theater, the Iranian theater, would in all likelihood have the most dire consequences, globally and in Iraq.

TD: Actually, I was planning to ask about your thoughts on the possibility of an Iranian October surprise.

Bacevich: You mean, attacking Iran before the upcoming fall election? I don't see Karl Rove - because an October surprise would be a political ploy - signing off on it. I think he's cunning, calculating, devious, but not stupid. With the president's popularity rating plummeting due to unhappiness with the ongoing war, it really would be irrational to think that yet another war would turn that around or secure continued Republican control of both houses of Congress.

TD: It seems that way to me with gas assumedly soaring to $120 a barrel or something like that ...

Bacevich: Oh gosh, oh my gosh, yes ...

TD: But let me throw this into the mix, because I've seen no one mention it: If you look at the list of retired commanders who came out against Rumsfeld, they're all from the Army or Marines. We always say the military is overextended, but only part of it is - and I note the absence of admirals or anybody connected to the Air Force.

Bacevich: That's a good point. One could argue that the revolt of the generals actually has a third source. If the first source is arguing about who's going to take the fall for Iraq and the second is trying to put a damper on war in Iran, the third has to do with Rumsfeld's military transformation project. To oversimplify, transformation begins with the conviction that the military since the end of the Cold War has failed to adapt to the opportunities and imperatives of the information age. Well before September 11, the central part of Rumsfeld's agenda was to "transform" - that was his word - this old Cold-War-style military, to make it lighter, more agile, to emphasize information technology and precision weapons.

Well, if you're in the Air Force, or you're a Navy admiral, particularly one in the aviation community, that recipe sounds pretty good. It sounds like dollars, like programs being funded. But if you're in the Army or the Marine Corps, becoming lighter and more agile sounds like cutting divisions or like getting rid of tanks and artillery; it sounds like a smaller Marine Corps.

Both the initial stage of the Afghanistan War and the invasion of Iraq were specifically designed by Rumsfeld as projects to demonstrate what a transformed military could do. Hence, his insistence on beginning the Iraq War without a major build-up, on invading with a relatively small force, on having the ground intervention accompany the air campaign rather than having a protracted air campaign first as in the first Gulf War. All the literature about both Afghanistan and Iraq now shows that the war-planning process was filled with great civil/military tension. The generals argued, "Mr Secretary, here's the plan; we want to do a Desert Storm Two against Iraq," and Rumsfeld kept replying, "I want something smaller, think it over again and get back to me" - reflecting his intention to demonstrate his notion of how America will henceforth fight its wars.

Well, now we can see the outcome and it's at best ambiguous. That is to say, the early stages of Afghanistan and Iraq proved to be smashing successes. The smaller, agile forces performed remarkably well in demolishing both the Taliban and the Ba'ath Party regime; but in both cases, genuine victory has proven enormously elusive. This gets us to the third basis for the generals' gripe. When they talk about Rumsfeld's incompetence and micromanagement, they're arguing against the transformation project and on behalf of those services which have footed most of the bill.

TD: Just to throw one other thing into the mix, if there were a campaign against Iran, it would be a Navy and Air Force one.

Bacevich: It would begin with a Navy and Air Force campaign, but it wouldn't end that way. If the Army generals could be assured that we know exactly where the Iranian nuclear program is, that we have the targeting data and the munitions to take it out ... Well, that would be one thing, but we don't have that assurance. From the Army and Marine Corps perspective, an air attack might begin a war with Iran, but the war would not end there. As is the case in both Afghanistan and Iraq, some sort of ugly aftermath would be sure to follow and the Navy and the Air Force aren't going to be there, at least not in large numbers.

TD: What about the Iraq War at present?

Bacevich: There are a couple of important implications that we have yet to confront. The war has exposed the shallowness of American military power. I mean, since the end of the Cold War we Americans have been beating our chests about being the greatest military power the world has ever seen. [His voice rises.] Overshadowing the power of the Third Reich! Overshadowing the Roman Empire!

Wait a sec. This country of 290 million people has a force of about 130,000 soldiers committed in Iraq, fighting something on the order of 10-20,000 insurgents and a) we're in a war we can't win, b) we're in the fourth year of a war we probably can't sustain much longer. For those who believe in the American imperial project, and who see military supremacy as the foundation of that empire, this ought to be a major concern: What are we going to do to strengthen the sinews of American military power, because it's turned out that our vaunted military supremacy is not what it was cracked up to be. If you're like me and you're quite skeptical about this imperial project, the stresses imposed on the military and the obvious limits of our power simply serve to emphasize the imperative of rethinking our role in the world so we can back away from this unsustainable notion of global hegemony.

Then, there's the matter of competence. I object to the generals saying that our problems in Iraq are all due to the micromanagement and incompetence of Mr Rumsfeld - I do think he's a micromanager and a failure and ought to have been fired long ago - because it distracts attention from the woeful performance of the senior military leaders who have really made a hash of the Iraq insurgency. I remember General Swannack in particular blaming Rumsfeld for Abu Ghraib. I'll saddle Rumsfeld with about 10% of the blame for Abu Ghraib, the other 90% rests with the senior American military leaders in Baghdad ...

TD: General Ricardo Sanchez signed off on it ...

Bacevich: Sanchez being number one. So again, if one is an enthusiast for American military supremacy, we have some serious thinking to do about the quality of our senior leadership. Are we picking the right people to be our two, three, and four-star commanders? Are we training them, educating them properly for the responsibilities that they face? The Iraq War has revealed some major weaknesses in that regard.

TD: Do you think that the neo-cons and their mentors, Rumsfeld and the vice president, believed too deeply in the hype of American hyperpower? Ruling groups, even while manipulating others, often seem to almost hypnotically convince themselves as well.

Bacevich: That's why I myself tend not to buy into the charge that Bush and others blatantly lied us into this war. I think they believed most of what they claimed. You should probably put believe in quotes, because it amounts to talking yourself into it. They believed that American omnipotence, as well as know-how and determination, could imprint democracy on Iraq. They really believed that, once they succeeded in Iraq, a whole host of ancillary benefits were going to ensue, transforming the political landscape of the Middle East. All of those expectations were bizarre delusions and we're paying the consequences now.

You know, the neo-conservatives that mattered were not those in government like Douglas Feith or people on the National Security Council staff, but the writers and intellectuals outside of government who, in the period from the late '70s through the '90s, were constantly weaving this narrative of triumphalism, pretending to insights about power and the direction of history. Intellectuals can put their imprint on public discourse. They can create an environment, an atmosphere. When the events of September 11, 2001, left Americans shocked and frightened and people started casting about for an explanation, a way of framing a response, the neo-conservative perspective was front and center and had a particular appeal. So these writers and intellectuals did influence policy, at least for a brief moment.

TD: Here's something that puzzles me. When I look at administration actions, I see a Middle Eastern catastrophe in the midst of which an Iranian situation is being ratcheted up. Then there's China, once upon a time the enemy of choice for the neo-cons and Rumsfeld, and now here we are this summer having the largest naval maneuvers since Vietnam, four carrier task forces, off the Chinese coast. Then - as with Cheney's recent speech - there's the attempted rollback of what's left of the USSR, which has been ongoing. On the side, you've got the Pentagon pushing little Latin American bases all the way down to Paraguay. So many fronts, so much overstretch, and no backing down that I can see. What do you make of this?

Bacevich: My own sense is that this administration has largely exhausted its stock of intellectual resources; that, for the most part, they're preoccupied with trying to manage Iraq. Beyond that, I'm hard-pressed to see a coherent strategy in the Middle East or elsewhere. In that sense, Iraq is like Vietnam. It just sucks up all the oxygen. Having said that, before being eclipsed by September 11 and its aftermath, China was indeed the enemy-designate of the hawks, and a cadre of them is still active in Washington. I would guess that large naval exercises reflect their handiwork. Still, I don't think there's been a resolution within the political elite of exactly how we ought to view China and what the US relationship with China will be.

Why the hell we're extending bases into Latin America is beyond me. Rumsfeld just announced that he has appointed an admiral as the head of US Southern Command. Now this has almost always been an Army billet, once or twice a Marine billet, never a Navy one. I got an email today from someone who suggested that this was another example of Rumsfeld's "boldness". My response was: Well, if he was bold, he'd simply shut down the Southern Command. Wouldn't it be a wonderful way to communicate that US-Latin American relations had matured to the point where they no longer revolved around security concerns? Wouldn't it be interesting for Washington to signal that there is one region of the world that does not require US military supervision; that we really don't need to have some four-star general parading around from country to country in the manner of some proconsul supervising his quarter of the American Empire?

Now, I have friends who think that [Venezuelan President Hugo] Chavez poses a threat to the United States. I find that notion utterly preposterous, but it does reflect this inclination to see any relationship having any discord or dissonance as requiring a security - that is, military - response. I find it all crazy and contrary to our own interests.

TD: One thing that's ratcheted up in recent years is the way the Pentagon's taken over so many aspects of policy, turning much of diplomacy into military-to-military relations.

Bacevich: If you look at long-term trends, going back to the early Cold War, the Defense Department has accrued ever more influence and authority at the expense of the State Department. But there's another piece to this - within the Defense Department itself, as the generals and the senior civilians have vied with one another for clout. When Rumsfeld and [Paul] Wolfowitz came into office they were determined to shift the balance of civil/military authority within the Pentagon. They were intent on trimming the sails of the generals. You could see this in all kinds of ways, some symbolic. Regional commanders used to be called CINCs, the acronym for commander-in-chief. Rumsfeld said: Wait a minute, there's only one commander-in-chief and that's my boss, so you generals who work for me, you're not commanders-in-chief any more. Now the guy who runs US Southern Command is just a "combatant commander".

Also indicative of this effort to shift power back to the civilians is the role played by the joint chiefs of staff, which has been nonexistent for all practical purposes. Accounts of the planning and conduct of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars make clear that they had virtually no influence at all. They were barely, barely consulted. Ever since Colin Powell was chairman of the joint chiefs and became a quasi-independent power broker, presidents have chosen weak chairmen. Presidents want top officers to be accommodating rather than forceful personalities who might hold independent views. I'm sure General Myers of the Air Force is a wonderful man and a patriot, but he served four years as chairman after September 11 and did so without leaving any discernible mark on policy. And that's not accidental. It reflects Rumsfeld's efforts to wrest authority back towards the office of the Secretary of Defense.

TD: Isn't this actually part of a larger pattern in which authority is wrested from everywhere and brought into this commander-in-chief presidency?

Bacevich: That's exactly right. I've just finished a review of Cobra II, this new book by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor. A major theme of the book is that people like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz saw September 11 as a great opportunity. Yes, it was a disaster. Yes, it was terrible. But by God, this was a disaster that could be turned to enormous advantage.

Here lay the chance to remove constraints on the exercise of American military power, enabling the Bush administration to shore up, expand, and perpetuate US global hegemony. Toward that end, senior officials concocted this notion of a "global war on terror", really a cover story for an effort to pacify and transform the broader Middle East, a gargantuan project which is doomed to fail. Committing the United States to that project presumed a radical redistribution of power within Washington. The hawks had to cut off at the knees institutions or people uncomfortable with the unconstrained exercise of American power. And who was that? Well, that was the CIA. That was the State Department, especially the State Department of Secretary Colin Powell. That was the Congress - note this weird notion that the Congress is somehow limiting presidential prerogatives - and the hawks also had to worry about the uniformed military, whom they considered "averse to risk" and incapable of understanding modern warfare in an information age.

TD: And you might throw in the courts. After all, the two men appointed to the Supreme Court are, above all else, believers in the unitary executive theory of the presidency.

Bacevich: Yes, it fits. I would emphasize that it's not because Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz are diabolical creatures intent on doing evil. They genuinely believe it's in the interests of the United States, and the world, that unconstrained American power should determine the shape of the international order. I think they vastly overstate our capabilities. For all of their supposed worldliness and sophistication, I don't think they understand the world. I am persuaded that their efforts will only lead to greater mischief while undermining our democracy. Yet I don't question that, at some gut level, they think they are acting on your behalf and mine. They are all the more dangerous as a result.

Part 2 of Andrew Bacevich's interview, "Drifting down the path to perdition".

Tom Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the author of The End of Victory Culture. (Copyright 2006 Tomdispatch. Used with permission) >

DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
Drifting down the path to perdition

Part 2 of Tom Engelhardt's interview Andrew Bacevich, a former military man and now a vocal critic of US foreign policy

(See also Part 1, The delusions of global hegemony)

Tomdispatch: I'd like to turn to the issue of oil wars, energy wars. That seems to be what holds all this incoherent stuff together - minds focused on a world of energy flows. Recently, I reread [president Jimmy] Carter's 1979 energy speech. Isn't it ironic that he got laughed out of the room for his sweater and for urging a future of alternative fuels on us, while we latched on to his Rapid Deployment Force for the Persian Gulf? As you argue in your book, The New American Militarism, this essentially starts us on what you call "World War IV".

Andrew Bacevich: I remember the Carter speech. I was a relatively young man at the time. In general, I have voted for Republicans, although not this Republican in 2004 [George W Bush]. But I did vote for Carter because I was utterly disenchanted with [president Richard] Nixon and [his national security adviser Henry] Kissinger. [President Gerald] Ford seemed weak, incompetent. And I remember being dismayed by the Carter speech because it seemed so out of sync with the American spirit. It wasn't optimistic; it did not promise that we would have more tomorrow than we have today, that the future would be bigger and better. Carter essentially said: If we are serious about freedom, we must really think about what freedom means - and it ought to mean something more than acquisition and conspicuous consumption. And if we're going to preserve our freedom, we have to start living within our means.

It did not sit well with me at the time. Only when I was writing my militarism book did I take another look at the speech, and then it knocked me over. I said to myself: This guy got it. I don't know how, but he really got it, in two respects. First, he grasped the essence of our national predicament, of being seduced by a false and even demeaning definition of freedom. Second, he understood that cheap oil was the drug that was leading us willy-nilly down this path. The two were directly and intimately linked: a growing dependence on seemingly cheap foreign oil and our inability to recognize what we might call the ongoing cultural crisis of our time.

Carter gives the so-called malaise speech, I think, in July '79. The Russians invade Afghanistan in December '79. Then comes Carter's State of the Union Address in January 1980 in which he, in a sense, recants, abandoning the argument of July and saying, by God, the Persian Gulf is of vital interest to the United States and we'll use any means necessary in order to prevent somebody else from controlling it. To put some teeth in this threat he creates the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, which sets in motion the militarization of US policy that has continued ever since. So July 1979 to January 1980, that's the pivotal moment that played such an important role in bringing us to where we are today. But of course we didn't understand that then - certainly I didn't. In July 1979, Carter issued a prescient warning. We didn't want to listen. So we blew it.

Fast-forward to 2006, and President Bush is telling us, thank you very much, that we're addicted to oil. I heard [House Minority Leader] Nancy Pelosi on the radio over the weekend saying that the Democrats now have a plan to make us energy-independent by 2020. She's lying through her teeth. There's no way anybody can make us energy-independent by then. We needed to start back in 1979, if not before. Even to achieve independence from Persian Gulf oil will be an enormously costly, painful process that none of the politicians in either party are willing to undertake. [Gasoline] is now roughly US$3 a gallon [nearly 80 cents a liter]. I heard some guy on a talk show the other day say: "Whaddya think we should do? I think we should all park our cars on the Interstate [highway] and stop traffic until the government does something." What does he actually want the government to do, I wondered? Conquer another country?

We Americans are in deep denial, unwilling to accept that we're going to have to change the way we live for our own good. Empire does not offer the recipe for preserving our freedom. Learning to live within our means just might. Jimmy Carter was the one guy, back in July of '79, who really had the guts to say that. Unfortunately, he didn't have the guts to stick with it.

TD: I always wonder what would have happened if we had dumped a bunch of money into research and development for alternative fuels back then.

Bacevich: The funding for the Iraq war is now in the hundreds of billions of dollars. [Economist] Joseph Stiglitz projects that total costs could go to $2 trillion. What would a trillion dollars have done for research into alternative fuels? I don't know, but something ... something! What do you get for a trillion dollars in Iraq? Nothin'. It's just nuts!

TD: I was amused, by the way, that you were born in Normal, Illinois ...

Bacevich: ... Because the Normal School of the State of Illinois, the teachers' college, was there.

TD: I was also thinking about stereotypes of military men. You know, rigidity of mind and the like. What strikes me in your writings is that you seem more open to rethinking your world view than almost any scholar around. So I was curious about the evolution of your thought.

Bacevich: Two key moments for me were the end of the Cold War and the Iraq war. The simple story would be that, for the first 20-some years of my adult life, which coincided with the latter stages of the Cold War, I was a serving officer. I was a Cold Warrior in uniform. I therefore accepted the orthodox narrative of the Cold War and of the postwar era more generally. I was not oblivious to policy errors we had made and some of the sins we had committed, but as long as I was in uniform I was willing to accept that these were peripheral to the larger narrative. I did retain this notion that the Cold War was an emergency, a very long, serious one in which we as a nation had been called upon to depart from the norm. This was not the way things were supposed to be, particularly in regard to a globally deployed military establishment.

TD: Let me back you up for a moment to Vietnam. You fought there ...

Bacevich: Nineteen seventy to '71.

TD: ... And how did you come out of Vietnam?

Bacevich: For a variety of personal reasons, my wife and I decided to stay in the army after my obligation was up ... [He hesitates.] For those who are not familiar with military service, it may be difficult to appreciate the extent to which that life is all-embracing. It's like being a monk. It's a calling. Soldiers work real hard. And much of that work is peculiarly satisfying. For most of my time in the service, women were few in number and on the margins. So it was a very masculine environment. This might seem retro, but men living among men and doing manly things [he laughs], there is a peculiar savor to that. At any rate, I bought into the institutional view of Vietnam - that we had been screwed. The politicians had screwed us; the media had screwed us; the American people had screwed us. They had let us down, and so my commitment was to an institution that, after Vietnam, was engaged in a comprehensive effort to reconstitute and restore itself - and its standing in American society.

In that context, the questions I was willing to ask about Vietnam or about US foreign policy more generally were fairly narrow. Since getting out of the army, since trying to make sense of the Cold War and US foreign policy from a different perspective, I've come to see the Vietnam War differently as well. I can accept to some degree the argument that the meaning of Vietnam is to be found in "the military gets hung out to dry", but that's not sufficient. And I've come to see the war as just utterly unnecessary, misguided and mistaken. A monumental miscalculation that never should have happened, but that did happen due to some deep-seated defects in the way we see ourselves and see the world.

In any case, the Cold War essentially ends in 1989 when the [Berlin] Wall goes down; in '91, the Soviet Union collapses. I get out of the army in 1992 and I'm waiting with bated breath to see what impact the end of the Cold War is going to have on US policy, particularly military policy. The answer is, essentially, none. We come out even more firmly committed to the notion of US military global supremacy. Not because there was an enemy - in 1992, '93, '94, there's no enemy - but because we've come to see military supremacy and global hegemony as good in and of themselves.

The end of the Cold War sees us using military power more frequently, while our ambitions, our sense of what we're supposed to do in the world, become more grandiose. There's all this bloated talk about "the end of history", and the "right side of history", and the "indispensable nation", politicians and pundits pretending to know the destiny of humankind. So I began to question my understanding of what had determined US behavior during the Cold War. The orthodox narrative said that the US behaved as it did because of them, because of external threats. I came to believe that explanation was not entirely wrong but limited. You get closer to the truth by recognizing that what makes us behave the way we behave comes from inside. I came to buy into the views of historians like Charles Beard and William Appleton Williams who emphasize that foreign policy is an outgrowth of domestic policy, in particular of the structure of the American political economy.

So I became a critic of US foreign policy in the 1990s, a pretty outspoken one.

TD: You wrote a book then with the word "empire" in the title ...

Bacevich: Yes, because I became convinced that what we saw in the '90s from both Democrats and Republicans was an effort to expand an informal American empire. Fast-forward to September 11 [2001] and its aftermath, and the Bush doctrine of preventive war as implemented in Iraq, and the full dimensions of our imperial ambitions become evident for all to see.

I have to say, I certainly supported the Afghanistan war. I emphatically believed that we had no choice but to take down the Taliban regime in order to demonstrate clearly the consequences of any nation tolerating, housing, supporting terrorists who attack us. But the Iraq war just struck me as so unnecessary, unjustifiable, and reckless that ... I don't know how to articulate its impact except that it put me unalterably in the camp of those who had come to see American power as the problem, not the solution. And it brought me close to despair that the response of the internal opposition and of the American people generally proved to be so tepid, so ineffective. It led me to conclude that we are in deep, deep trouble.

An important manifestation of that trouble is this shortsighted infatuation with military power that goes beyond even what I wrote about in my most recent book. Again, it revolves around this question of energy and oil. There's such an unwillingness to confront the dilemmas we face as a people that I find deeply troubling. I know we're a democracy. We have elections. But it's become a procedural democracy. Our politics are not really meaningful. In a meaningful politics, you and I could argue about important differences, and out of that argument might come not resolution or reconciliation, but at least an awareness of the consequences of going your way as opposed to mine. We don't even have that argument. That's what's so dismaying.

TD: You've used the word "crusade" and spoken of this administration as "intoxicated with the mission of salvation". I was wondering what kind of "ism" you think we've been living with in these years.

Bacevich: That's a great question, and it's not enough to say that it's democratic capitalism. Certainly, our "ism" incorporates a religious dimension - in the sense of believing that God created this nation for a purpose that has to do with universal values.

We have not as a people come to terms with our relationship to military power and to the wars we've engaged in and the ways we've engaged in them. Now, James Carroll in his new book, House of War is very much preoccupied with strategic bombing in World War II and since, and especially with our use of, and attitude toward, nuclear weapons. His preoccupation is understandable because those are the things we can't digest and we can't cough up. You know, at the end of the day, we, the missionary nation, the crusader state, certain of our righteousness, remain the only people to have used nuclear weapons in anger - indeed, to have used them as a weapon of terror.

TD: Air power, even though hardly covered in our media in Iraq, has been the American way of war since World War II, hasn't it?

Bacevich: Certainly that "ism" that defines us has a large technological component, doesn't it? I mean, we are the people of technology. We see the future as a technological one and can't imagine a problem that doesn't have technological solutions ...

TD: ... Except when it comes to oil.

Bacevich: Quite true. In many respects, the technological artifact that defines the last century is the airplane. With the airplane came a distinctive style of warfare. The Italians dropped the first bomb in North Africa; the Japanese killed their share of civilians from the air as did the Germans, but we and our British cousins outdid them all. I've been thinking more and more that our record of strategic bombing is not simply an issue of historical interest.

We are not who we believe we are and, in some sense, others perceive us more accurately than we do ourselves. The president has described a version of history - as did [president Bill] Clinton, by the way - beginning with World War II in which the United States is the liberator, Americans are the bringers of freedom. There is truth to that narrative, but it's not the whole truth; and, quite frankly, it's not the truth that matters a lick, let's say, to the Islamic world today. Muslims don't give a darn that we brought [Adolf] Hitler or the Third Reich to its knees. What they're aware of is all kinds of other behavior, particularly in their neck of the woods, that had nothing to do with spreading democracy and freedom, that had everything to do with power, with trying to establish relations that maximized the benefit to the United States and American society. We don't have to let our hearts bleed about that. That's the way politics works, but let's not delude ourselves either. When President George W Bush says, "America stands for freedom and liberty, and we're coming to liberate you," it's absurd to expect people in that part of the world to take us seriously. That's not what they've seen and known and experienced in dealing with the United States.

TD: And, of course, within the councils of this administration, they threw out anyone who knew anything about the record of US policy in the Islamic world.

Bacevich: Because those experts would have challenged the ideologically soaked version of history that this administration has attempted to carry over into the 21st century. Only if we begin to see ourselves more clearly will we be able to understand how others see us. We need to revise the narrative of the American century and recognize that it has been about a host of other things that are far more problematic than liberation. There can be no understanding the true nature of the American century without acknowledging the reality of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Hanoi, and Haiphong.

TD: Do you, by the way, think that the reality-based community is catching up with the Bush administration?

Bacevich: It's catching up, but is it in a way that has political consequences? If we just toss Bush out and bring in ... Who? Senator [Hillary] Clinton or John McCain? Will things be different? Somehow, I don't think so. Of course, there is something to be said for competence even in implementing a bad policy. Right now, we have incompetents implementing a bad policy, but the essence of the problem is the policy - not just the Iraq war but this paradigm of a "global war on terror", this notion of unconstraining American power. That's what we have to rethink.

TD: Your thoughts on three military matters: what might be called the "religionizing" of the military; the Bush administration's setting up of a Northern Command in 2002 for the so-called homeland, which I find disturbing; and finally, what do you make of the now-normalized practice of presenting the costs of war-fighting as a non-Defense Department budget supplementary item?

Bacevich: I think the last thing in your list is outlandish and irresponsible. It's as if we're keeping two sets of books. But again, the administration abetted by the Congress plays these games and nobody seems to care. Still, it doesn't change the facts - that we're spending more on defense than the rest of the world put together. That has no precedent. And are we becoming safer and more secure and more prosperous? If we're not yet secure, does that mean we should be spending twice again as much? I have friends who think we should, or who at least believe that the defense budget is inadequate. I myself think that the flinging of money at the Defense Department ought to prompt Americans to reconsider the notion that the solution to our problems is to be found in the realm of military power.

I think the evangelizing issue reflects at least three things. No 1, the elite disengagement from the military after Vietnam. The Episcopalians don't sign up anymore, or the Presbyterians. No 2, the heightened political engagement of Christian evangelicals who, by the 1960s, had embarked on a crusade to save America from itself. Evangelicals have long seen the US military as allies in that cause. American society may be going to hell in a hand basket with its promiscuity, its pornography, its divorce rates, its abortion, its women's rights, all these things evangelicals lament, but the military's a bastion of traditional virtue. Now, they misperceive soldiers in that regard, but I think that's one reason military service has a special appeal for evangelical Christians.

Third comes the politicization of the military. When I first became an officer, the tradition of being apolitical was still deeply rooted. As one consequence of Vietnam, that went away. The officer corps came to see its interests as lying with the political right. Evangelical Christianity is just part of a larger mix.

TD: So, you have an all-embracing world that has become more politicized, that's moved south, and that has few new streams of blood heading into it, unlike in the era of the draft or of the World War. What are the results of the military becoming less and less like American society?

Bacevich: I think it's bad news. The only good news - this is pure speculation, as there's no evidence for it - might be that since the Iraq war is the handiwork of a conservative, evangelical, Republican president, perhaps members of the officer corps will begin to rethink where their loyalties should lie and will come to the realization that hitching their flag to the Republican Party is not necessarily good for their institutional interests. The officer corps loved [president Ronald] Reagan. He saved the military. And here we have, according to some people, the most Reaganite president since Reagan who seems to be doing his damnedest to destroy the military. That might have some impact.

TD: About a year ago you said, "The only way I can envision a meaningful political change along the lines that I would like to see would be in reaction to an awful disaster." Would you like to comment?

Bacevich: A disaster like that could go either way. One hates to speculate on this, but were there another September 11, the likely result could be that Americans would rise up in their righteous anger and say, let's go kill them all. But it's at least possible to hope that such a disaster might offer an opportunity for people who are advancing alternative views to be heard.

One of the strange things about the Iraq war and other post-September 11 policies is that, except for gas being at $3 a gallon, who the hell cares? Part of the cunning genius of the Bush administration has been the way it's insulated Americans from the effects of their policies. You know, September 11 happens and they seize upon it to declare their "global war on terror". The president says from the outset that this is a long war, that it may take decades, that it's comparable to the world wars. On the other hand, he chooses not to mobilize the nation. There are no changes in our domestic priorities; no significant expansion of the armed forces.

Well, why was that? In their confidence about how great our military power was, they calculated that what we had would suffice. That was a major miscalculation. But I think they also calculated that by telling Americans, as President Bush famously did, to go down to Disney World and enjoy this great country of ours, they would be able to buy themselves political protection. Even though opinion polls show that public support for the president has dropped tremendously, in a sense events have proved them right. They have not been held accountable for their egregious mistakes because average citizens like you and me don't really feel the pain in any direct way.

Now, if the president had said: We're going to cut back on our domestic programs; we're going to raise taxes because this is an important war and, by God, we need to pay for it; we need a bigger army and so we're going to impose a draft - then I think Americans might have been more attentive to what's been happening over the past four years. But alas, they've not been. Instead, we've drifted down the path toward perdition.

Tom Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the author of The End of Victory Culture.

(Copyright 2006 Tomdispatch. Used with permission)

[April 20, 2005] Tomgram Andrew Bacevich on the New American Militarism

We are now in an America where it's a commonplace for our President, wearing a "jacket with ARMY printed over his heart and 'Commander in Chief' printed on his right front," to address vast assemblages of American troops on the virtues of bringing democracy to foreign lands at the point of a missile. As Jim VandeHei of the Washington Post puts it: "Increasingly, the president uses speeches to troops to praise American ideals and send a signal to other nations the administration is targeting for democratic change."

As it happens, the Bush administration has other, no less militarized ways of signaling "change" that are even blunter. We already have, for instance, hundreds and hundreds of military bases, large and small, spread around the world, but never enough, never deeply enough embedded in the former borderlands of the Soviet Union and the energy heartlands of our planet. The military budget soars; planning for high-tech weaponry for the near (and distant) future -- like the Common Aero Vehicle, a suborbital space capsule capable of delivering "conventional" munitions anywhere on the planet within 2 hours and due to come on line by 2010 -- is the normal order of business in Pentagonized Washington. War, in fact, is increasingly the American way of life and, to a certain extent, it's almost as if no one notices.

Well, not quite no one. Andrew J. Bacevich has written a book on militarism, American-style, of surpassing interest. Just published, The New American Militarism, How Americans Are Seduced by War would be critical reading no matter who wrote it. But coming from Bacevich, a West Point graduate, Vietnam veteran, former contributor to such magazines as the Weekly Standard and the National Review, and former Bush Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, it has special resonance.

Bacevich, a self-professed conservative, has clearly been a man on a journey. He writes that he still situates himself "culturally on the right. And I continue to view the remedies proferred by mainstream liberalism with skepticism. But my disenchantment with what passes for mainstream conservatism, embodied in the present Bush administration and its groupies, is just about absolute. Fiscal irresponsibility, a buccaneering foreign policy, a disregard for the Constitution, the barest lip service as a response to profound moral controversies: these do not qualify as authentically conservative values. On this score my views have come to coincide with the critique long offered by the radical left: it is the mainstream itself, the professional liberals as well as the professional conservatives who define the problem."

I've long recommended Chalmers Johnson's book on American militarism and military-basing policy, The Sorrows of Empire. Bacevich's The New American Militarism, which focuses on the ways Americans have become enthralled by -- and found themselves in thrall to -- military power and the idea of global military supremacy, should be placed right beside it in any library. Below, you'll find the first of two long excerpts (slightly adapated) from the book, and posted with the kind permission of the author and of his publisher, Oxford University Press. This one offers Bacevitch's thoughts on the ways in which, since the Vietnam War, our country has been militarized, a process to which, as he writes, the events of September 11 only added momentum. On Friday, I'll post an excerpt on the second-generation neoconservatives and what they contributed to our new militarism.

Bacevich's book carefully lays out and analyzes the various influences that have fed into the creation and sustenance of the new American militarism over the last decades. It would have been easy enough to create a 4-part or 6-part Tomdispatch series from the book. Bacevich is, for instance, fascinating on evangelical Christianity (and its less than war-like earlier history) as well as on the ways in which the military, after the Vietnam debacle, rebuilt itself as a genuine imperial force, separated from the American people and with an ethos "more akin to that of the French Foreign Legion" -- a force prepared for war without end. But for that, and much else, you'll have to turn to the book itself. Tom

The Normalization of War

By Andrew J. Bacevich

At the end of the Cold War, Americans said yes to military power. The skepticism about arms and armies that pervaded the American experiment from its founding, vanished. Political leaders, liberals and conservatives alike, became enamored with military might.

The ensuing affair had and continues to have a heedless, Gatsby-like aspect, a passion pursued in utter disregard of any consequences that might ensue. Few in power have openly considered whether valuing military power for its own sake or cultivating permanent global military superiority might be at odds with American principles. Indeed, one striking aspect of America's drift toward militarism has been the absence of dissent offered by any political figure of genuine stature.

For example, when Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, ran for the presidency in 2004, he framed his differences with George W. Bush's national security policies in terms of tactics rather than first principles. Kerry did not question the wisdom of styling the U.S. response to the events of 9/11 as a generations-long "global war on terror." It was not the prospect of open-ended war that drew Kerry's ire. It was rather the fact that the war had been "extraordinarily mismanaged and ineptly prosecuted." Kerry faulted Bush because, in his view, U.S. troops in Iraq lacked "the preparation and hardware they needed to fight as effectively as they could." Bush was expecting too few soldiers to do too much with too little. Declaring that "keeping our military strong and keeping our troops as safe as they can be should be our highest priority," Kerry promised if elected to fix these deficiencies. Americans could count on a President Kerry to expand the armed forces and to improve their ability to fight.

Yet on this score Kerry's circumspection was entirely predictable. It was the candidate's way of signaling that he was sound on defense and had no intention of departing from the prevailing national security consensus.

Under the terms of that consensus, mainstream politicians today take as a given that American military supremacy is an unqualified good, evidence of a larger American superiority. They see this armed might as the key to creating an international order that accommodates American values. One result of that consensus over the past quarter century has been to militarize U.S. policy and to encourage tendencies suggesting that American society itself is increasingly enamored with its self-image as the military power nonpareil

How Much Is Enough?

This new American militarism manifests itself in several different ways. It does so, first of all, in the scope, cost, and configuration of America's present-day military establishment.

Through the first two centuries of U.S. history, political leaders in Washington gauged the size and capabilities of America's armed services according to the security tasks immediately at hand. A grave and proximate threat to the nation's well-being might require a large and powerful military establishment. In the absence of such a threat, policymakers scaled down that establishment accordingly. With the passing of crisis, the army raised up for the crisis went immediately out of existence. This had been the case in 1865, in 1918, and in 1945.

Since the end of the Cold War, having come to value military power for its own sake, the United States has abandoned this principle and is committed as a matter of policy to maintaining military capabilities far in excess of those of any would-be adversary or combination of adversaries. This commitment finds both a qualitative and quantitative expression, with the U.S. military establishment dwarfing that of even America's closest ally. Thus, whereas the U.S. Navy maintains and operates a total of twelve large attack aircraft carriers, the once-vaunted [British] Royal Navy has none -- indeed, in all the battle fleets of the world there is no ship even remotely comparable to a Nimitz-class carrier, weighing in at some ninety-seven thousand tons fully loaded, longer than three football fields, cruising at a speed above thirty knots, and powered by nuclear reactors that give it an essentially infinite radius of action. Today, the U.S. Marine Corps possesses more attack aircraft than does the entire Royal Air Force -- and the United States has two other even larger "air forces," one an integral part of the Navy and the other officially designated as the U.S. Air Force. Indeed, in terms of numbers of men and women in uniform, the U.S. Marine Corps is half again as large as the entire British Army--and the Pentagon has a second, even larger "army" actually called the U.S. Army -- which in turn also operates its own "air force" of some five thousand aircraft.

All of these massive and redundant capabilities cost money. Notably, the present-day Pentagon budget, adjusted for inflation, is 12 percent larger than the average defense budget of the Cold War era. In 2002, American defense spending exceeded by a factor of twenty-five the combined defense budgets of the seven "rogue states" then comprising the roster of U.S. enemies.16 Indeed, by some calculations, the United States spends more on defense than all other nations in the world together. This is a circumstance without historical precedent.

Furthermore, in all likelihood, the gap in military spending between the United States and all other nations will expand further still in the years to come. Projected increases in the defense budget will boost Pentagon spending in real terms to a level higher than it was during the Reagan era. According to the Pentagon's announced long-range plans, by 2009 its budget will exceed the Cold War average by 23 percent -- despite the absence of anything remotely resembling a so-called peer competitor. However astonishing this fact might seem, it elicits little comment, either from political leaders or the press. It is simply taken for granted. The truth is that there no longer exists any meaningful context within which Americans might consider the question "How much is enough?"

On a day-to-day basis, what do these expensive forces exist to do? Simply put, for the Department of Defense and all of its constituent parts, defense per se figures as little more than an afterthought. The primary mission of America's far-flung military establishment is global power projection, a reality tacitly understood in all quarters of American society. To suggest that the U.S. military has become the world's police force may slightly overstate the case, but only slightly.

That well over a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union the United States continues to maintain bases and military forces in several dozens of countries -- by some counts well over a hundred in all -- rouses minimal controversy, despite the fact that many of these countries are perfectly capable of providing for their own security needs. That even apart from fighting wars and pursuing terrorists, U.S. forces are constantly prowling around the globe -- training, exercising, planning, and posturing -- elicits no more notice (and in some cases less) from the average American than the presence of a cop on a city street corner. Even before the Pentagon officially assigned itself the mission of "shaping" the international environment, members of the political elite, liberals and conservatives alike, had reached a common understanding that scattering U.S. troops around the globe to restrain, inspire, influence, persuade, or cajole paid dividends. Whether any correlation exists between this vast panoply of forward-deployed forces on the one hand and antipathy to the United States abroad on the other has remained for the most part a taboo subject.

The Quest for Military Dominion

The indisputable fact of global U.S. military preeminence also affects the collective mindset of the officer corps. For the armed services, dominance constitutes a baseline or a point of departure from which to scale the heights of ever greater military capabilities. Indeed, the services have come to view outright supremacy as merely adequate and any hesitation in efforts to increase the margin of supremacy as evidence of falling behind.

Thus, according to one typical study of the U.S. Navy's future, "sea supremacy beginning at our shore lines and extending outward to distant theaters is a necessary condition for the defense of the U.S." Of course, the U.S. Navy already possesses unquestioned global preeminence; the real point of the study is to argue for the urgency of radical enhancements to that preeminence. The officer-authors of this study express confidence that given sufficient money the Navy can achieve ever greater supremacy, enabling the Navy of the future to enjoy "overwhelming precision firepower," "pervasive surveillance," and "dominant control of a maneuvering area, whether sea, undersea, land, air, space or cyberspace." In this study and in virtually all others, political and strategic questions implicit in the proposition that supremacy in distant theaters forms a prerequisite of "defense" are left begging -- indeed, are probably unrecognized. At times, this quest for military dominion takes on galactic proportions. Acknowledging that the United States enjoys "superiority in many aspects of space capability," a senior defense official nonetheless complains that "we don't have space dominance and we don't have space supremacy." Since outer space is "the ultimate high ground," which the United States must control, he urges immediate action to correct this deficiency. When it comes to military power, mere superiority will not suffice.

The new American militarism also manifests itself through an increased propensity to use force, leading, in effect, to the normalization of war. There was a time in recent memory, most notably while the so-called Vietnam Syndrome infected the American body politic, when Republican and Democratic administrations alike viewed with real trepidation the prospect of sending U.S. troops into action abroad. Since the advent of the new Wilsonianism, however, self-restraint regarding the use of force has all but disappeared. During the entire Cold War era, from 1945 through 1988, large-scale U.S. military actions abroad totaled a scant six. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, they have become almost annual events. The brief period extending from 1989's Operation Just Cause (the overthrow of Manuel Noriega) to 2003's Operation Iraqi Freedom (the overthrow of Saddam Hussein) featured nine major military interventions. And that count does not include innumerable lesser actions such as Bill Clinton's signature cruise missile attacks against obscure targets in obscure places, the almost daily bombing of Iraq throughout the late 1990s, or the quasi-combat missions that have seen GIs dispatched to Rwanda, Colombia, East Timor, and the Philippines. Altogether, the tempo of U.S. military interventionism has become nothing short of frenetic.

As this roster of incidents lengthened, Americans grew accustomed to -- perhaps even comfortable with -- reading in their morning newspapers the latest reports of U.S. soldiers responding to some crisis somewhere on the other side of the globe. As crisis became a seemingly permanent condition so too did war. The Bush administration has tacitly acknowledged as much in describing the global campaign against terror as a conflict likely to last decades and in promulgating -- and in Iraq implementing -- a doctrine of preventive war.

In former times American policymakers treated (or at least pretended to treat) the use of force as evidence that diplomacy had failed. In our own time they have concluded (in the words of Vice President Dick Cheney) that force "makes your diplomacy more effective going forward, dealing with other problems." Policymakers have increasingly come to see coercion as a sort of all-purpose tool. Among American war planners, the assumption has now taken root that whenever and wherever U.S. forces next engage in hostilities, it will be the result of the United States consciously choosing to launch a war. As President Bush has remarked, the big lesson of 9/11 was that "this country must go on the offense and stay on the offense." The American public's ready acceptance of the prospect of war without foreseeable end and of a policy that abandons even the pretense of the United States fighting defensively or viewing war as a last resort shows clearly how far the process of militarization has advanced.

The New Aesthetic of War

Reinforcing this heightened predilection for arms has been the appearance in recent years of a new aesthetic of war. This is the third indication of advancing militarism.

The old twentieth-century aesthetic of armed conflict as barbarism, brutality, ugliness, and sheer waste grew out of World War I, as depicted by writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque, and Robert Graves. World War II, Korea, and Vietnam reaffirmed that aesthetic, in the latter case with films like Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket.

The intersection of art and war gave birth to two large truths. The first was that the modern battlefield was a slaughterhouse, and modern war an orgy of destruction that devoured guilty and innocent alike. The second, stemming from the first, was that military service was an inherently degrading experience and military institutions by their very nature repressive and inhumane. After 1914, only fascists dared to challenge these truths. Only fascists celebrated war and depicted armies as forward-looking -- expressions of national unity and collective purpose that paved the way for utopia. To be a genuine progressive, liberal in instinct, enlightened in sensibility, was to reject such notions as preposterous.

But by the turn of the twenty-first century, a new image of war had emerged, if not fully displacing the old one at least serving as a counterweight. To many observers, events of the 1990s suggested that war's very nature was undergoing a profound change. The era of mass armies, going back to the time of Napoleon, and of mechanized warfare, an offshoot of industrialization, was coming to an end. A new era of high-tech warfare, waged by highly skilled professionals equipped with "smart" weapons, had commenced. Describing the result inspired the creation of a new lexicon of military terms: war was becoming surgical, frictionless, postmodern, even abstract or virtual. It was "coercive diplomacy" -- the object of the exercise no longer to kill but to persuade. By the end of the twentieth century, Michael Ignatieff of Harvard University concluded, war had become "a spectacle." It had transformed itself into a kind of "spectator sport," one offering "the added thrill that it is real for someone, but not, happily, for the spectator." Even for the participants, fighting no longer implied the prospect of dying for some abstract cause, since the very notion of "sacrifice in battle had become implausible or ironic."

Combat in the information age promised to overturn all of "the hoary dictums about the fog and friction" that had traditionally made warfare such a chancy proposition. American commanders, affirmed General Tommy Franks, could expect to enjoy "the kind of Olympian perspective that Homer had given his gods."

In short, by the dawn of the twenty-first century the reigning postulates of technology-as-panacea had knocked away much of the accumulated blood-rust sullying war's reputation. Thus reimagined -- and amidst widespread assurances that the United States could be expected to retain a monopoly on this new way of war -- armed conflict regained an aesthetic respectability, even palatability, that the literary and artistic interpreters of twentieth-century military cataclysms were thought to have demolished once and for all. In the right circumstances, for the right cause, it now turned out, war could actually offer an attractive option--cost-effective, humane, even thrilling. Indeed, as the Anglo-American race to Baghdad conclusively demonstrated in the spring of 2003, in the eyes of many, war has once again become a grand pageant, performance art, or a perhaps temporary diversion from the ennui and boring routine of everyday life. As one observer noted with approval, "public enthusiasm for the whiz-bang technology of the U.S. military" had become "almost boyish." Reinforcing this enthusiasm was the expectation that the great majority of Americans could count on being able to enjoy this new type of war from a safe distance.

The Moral Superiority of the Soldier

This new aesthetic has contributed, in turn, to an appreciable boost in the status of military institutions and soldiers themselves, a fourth manifestation of the new American militarism.

Since the end of the Cold War, opinion polls surveying public attitudes toward national institutions have regularly ranked the armed services first. While confidence in the executive branch, the Congress, the media, and even organized religion is diminishing, confidence in the military continues to climb. Otherwise acutely wary of having their pockets picked, Americans count on men and women in uniform to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons. Americans fearful that the rest of society may be teetering on the brink of moral collapse console themselves with the thought that the armed services remain a repository of traditional values and old fashioned virtue.

Confidence in the military has found further expression in a tendency to elevate the soldier to the status of national icon, the apotheosis of all that is great and good about contemporary America. The men and women of the armed services, gushed Newsweek in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, "looked like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life. They were young, confident, and hardworking, and they went about their business with poise and élan." A writer for Rolling Stone reported after a more recent and extended immersion in military life that "the Army was not the awful thing that my [anti-military] father had imagined"; it was instead "the sort of America he always pictured when he explained… his best hopes for the country."

According to the old post-Vietnam-era political correctness, the armed services had been a refuge for louts and mediocrities who probably couldn't make it in the real world. By the turn of the twenty-first century a different view had taken hold. Now the United States military was "a place where everyone tried their hardest. A place where everybody… looked out for each other. A place where people -- intelligent, talented people -- said honestly that money wasn't what drove them. A place where people spoke openly about their feelings." Soldiers, it turned out, were not only more virtuous than the rest of us, but also more sensitive and even happier. Contemplating the GIs advancing on Baghdad in March 2003, the classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson saw something more than soldiers in battle. He ascertained "transcendence at work." According to Hanson, the armed services had "somehow distilled from the rest of us an elite cohort" in which virtues cherished by earlier generations of Americans continued to flourish.

Soldiers have tended to concur with this evaluation of their own moral superiority. In a 2003 survey of military personnel, "two-thirds [of those polled] said they think military members have higher moral standards than the nation they serve… Once in the military, many said, members are wrapped in a culture that values honor and morality." Such attitudes leave even some senior officers more than a little uncomfortable. Noting with regret that "the armed forces are no longer representative of the people they serve," retired admiral Stanley Arthur has expressed concern that "more and more, enlisted as well as officers are beginning to feel that they are special, better than the society they serve." Such tendencies, concluded Arthur, are "not healthy in an armed force serving a democracy."

In public life today, paying homage to those in uniform has become obligatory and the one unforgivable sin is to be found guilty of failing to "support the troops." In the realm of partisan politics, the political Right has shown considerable skill in exploiting this dynamic, shamelessly pandering to the military itself and by extension to those members of the public laboring under the misconception, a residue from Vietnam, that the armed services are under siege from a rabidly anti-military Left.

In fact, the Democratic mainstream -- if only to save itself from extinction -- has long since purged itself of any dovish inclinations. "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about," Madeleine Albright demanded of General Colin Powell, "if we can't use it?" As Albright's Question famously attests, when it comes to advocating the use of force, Democrats can be positively gung ho. Moreover, in comparison to their Republican counterparts, they are at least as deferential to military leaders and probably more reluctant to question claims of military expertise.

Even among Left-liberal activists, the reflexive anti-militarism of the 1960s has given way to a more nuanced view. Although hard-pressed to match self-aggrandizing conservative claims of being one with the troops, progressives have come to appreciate the potential for using the armed services to advance their own agenda. Do-gooders want to harness military power to their efforts to do good. Thus, the most persistent calls for U.S. intervention abroad to relieve the plight of the abused and persecuted come from the militant Left. In the present moment, writes Michael Ignatieff, "empire has become a precondition for democracy." Ignatieff, a prominent human rights advocate, summons the United States to "use imperial power to strengthen respect for self-determination [and] to give states back to abused, oppressed people who deserve to rule them for themselves."

The President as Warlord

Occasionally, albeit infrequently, the prospect of an upcoming military adventure still elicits opposition, even from a public grown accustomed to war. For example, during the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, large-scale demonstrations against President Bush's planned intervention filled the streets of many American cities. The prospect of the United States launching a preventive war without the sanction of the U.N. Security Council produced the largest outpouring of public protest that the country had seen since the Vietnam War. Yet the response of the political classes to this phenomenon was essentially to ignore it. No politician of national stature offered himself or herself as the movement's champion. No would-be statesman nursing even the slightest prospects of winning high national office was willing to risk being tagged with not supporting those whom President Bush was ordering into harm's way. When the Congress took up the matter, Democrats who denounced George W. Bush's policies in every other respect dutifully authorized him to invade Iraq. For up-and-coming politicians, opposition to war had become something of a third rail: only the very brave or the very foolhardy dared to venture anywhere near it.

More recently still, this has culminated in George W. Bush styling himself as the nation's first full-fledged warrior-president. The staging of Bush's victory lap shortly after the conquest of Baghdad in the spring of 2003 -- the dramatic landing on the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, with the president decked out in the full regalia of a naval aviator emerging from the cockpit to bask in the adulation of the crew -- was lifted directly from the triumphant final scenes of the movie Top Gun, with the boyish George Bush standing in for the boyish Tom Cruise. For this nationally televised moment, Bush was not simply mingling with the troops; he had merged his identity with their own and made himself one of them -- the president as warlord. In short order, the marketplace ratified this effort; a toy manufacturer offered for $39.99 a Bush look-alike military action figure advertised as "Elite Force Aviator: George W. Bush -- U.S. President and Naval Aviator."

Thus has the condition that worried C. Wright Mills in 1956 come to pass in our own day. "For the first time in the nation's history," Mills wrote, "men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end." While in earlier times Americans had viewed history as "a peaceful continuum interrupted by war," today planning, preparing, and waging war has become "the normal state and seemingly permanent condition of the United States." And "the only accepted 'plan' for peace is the loaded pistol."

Andrew J. Bacevich is Professor of International Relations and Director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University. A graduate of West Point and a Vietnam veteran, he has a doctorate in history from Princeton and was a Bush Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He is the author of several books, including the just published The New American Militarism, How Americans Are Seduced by War.

Copyright 2005 Andrew J. Bacevich

The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War, copyright © 2005 by Andrew J. Bacevich. Used by permission of the author and Oxford University Press, Inc.

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  1. MacQuarrie, Brian (05-15). "Son of professor opposed to war is killed in Iraq". Boston Globe.
  2. Bacevich, Andrew J. (03-01). "Rescinding the Bush Doctrine". The Boston Globe. Retrieved on 05-01.
  3. Honor the Fallen Army 1st Lt. Andrew J. Bacevich
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Last modified: January 20, 2021